King of Cuba

by Cristina Garcia

“¿Qué tal, hijo?”

  “I had that dream again.”

  “Which dream?”

  “The one where I’m engulfed in flames.”

  Goyo was in no mood to plumb the depths of his son’s psyche. “Have you told your dream to Dr. Recalde?”

  “Yeah.”

  It pained Goyo to hear his son’s voice sometimes. It sounded like death itself tolling for him.

  “What did she say?”

  “That every dream begins with a wish.”

  “So what is it you wish, hijo?”

  “To kill myself.”

  “You know I don’t like you talking like that.” The plush toilet seat squeaked. “What would Rudy do without you?”

  “Rudy has fleas. Fleas and aphids.”

  “Aphids?” Goyo unconsciously scratched his chest.

  “They’re everywhere.”

  “Listen to me. Have you taken your medicine?”

  “The aphids took them.”

  “Cálmate, I’ll call an exterminator. This is a problem that can be fixed.”

  “Dad.”

  “Sí, Goyito.”

  “Do you believe in reincarnation?”

  “Of course not, I’m Catholic. Mira, I’m busy right now. Take your medicine and I’ll call you back in an hour.”

  Goyo checked his watch and hobbled into the master bedroom, which was lavishly decorated in his wife’s fantasy of an elegant boudoir: gilded chandeliers, mounds of tasseled silk pillows, brocade-laden tables displaying photographs, mostly of her, professionally taken and touched up, in silver-plated frames. Every inch of the walls was crowded with mediocre oil paintings except for the one Goyo had found, dust-covered, in a Guadalajara antiques shop. The painting turned out to be the lost work of a renowned Mexican modernist and was appraised thirty years ago for the princely sum of sixty thousand dollars. He’d thought of leaving this painting to his son. It might be less dangerous than cash or a trust fund. Goyo saw something of his son’s fatalism in the painting, too, as if he, like the skeletal conquistador on horseback, had long ago bartered away his soul.

  Goyito’s hooliganism had begun even before his voice changed. At eleven, Goyito was selling marijuana to his fellow students and set fire to his school’s garbage cans. At the military academy in Pennsylvania to which Luisa had insisted on shipping him off, he hot-wired and stole cars. At the aviation school in New Hampshire, the only flying he did was from his shabby kitchen, the headquarters, Goyo later learned, of the sixth biggest cocaine operation in New England. Luisa refused to visit Goyito in jail then or during any of his subsequent incarcerations, the latest for a heist of household appliances—Sub-Zero refrigerators, stackable washers and dryers—from the Sears warehouse where he was briefly employed.

  Goyo shuffled toward his office, leaning heavily on his cane. He was worried about his brownstone, a five-story building on East Forty-Fifth Street, around the corner from the United Nations. For nearly fifty years, the building had been Goyo’s chief source of income. But now it was collapsing, literally collapsing, its support beams rotting away, its hardwood floors buckling and sloping, its banisters wobbling. Its grumbling tenants included the convertible sofa store on the ground floor (owned by a crook who sold substandard merchandise), the Turkish restaurant on the second floor (run by a couple from Ankara who hadn’t paid their rent since the shish kebab incident), and the occupants of the six more or less renovated apartments on floors three, four, and five, most notably ninety-two-year-old Mary DiTucci, arthritic and stone deaf in 5R, who paid a rent-controlled $312.56 a month with checks written in a trembling hand.

  Now this same building, his golden goose in Turtle Bay, was on the verge of crashing down on all their heads.

  Havana

  El Comandante rearranged the covers and surveyed his room, which was outfitted with two flat-screen televisions and the best medical equipment on the island. Essential tomes of history and political philosophy—Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Marx—lined the mahogany bookcase alongside a complete set of his Colombian novelist friend’s books, each signed and dedicated to him, including the one about Simón Bolívar’s last river journey, which was inscribed: To the only son of a bitch who ever dared come close . . . Affectionately, Babo.

  The tyrant was a great admirer of Bolívar, despite their tactical differences. Who else had had the balls to take on a fractured continent and battle, indefatigably, to make it whole? No matter that Bolívar had died, disgraced and disheartened, at little more than half the dictator’s present age. It was his vision that mattered. How consumed Babo had been while writing that novel, employing a phalanx of researchers to fact-check his subject’s every fart and sneeze. El Comandante had grown jealous, believing that Babo should be writing about the Cuban Revolution instead of Bolívar’s fruitless efforts, and he’d waited in vain for his own colossal novel. That Bolívar book had rocketed Babo to stratospheric fame, cementing his transcendence from warty, toad-faced journalist to world-class literary prince and ladies’ man. Given the choice, the tyrant had learned, most women chose poetry over power.

  Over the years El Comandante had entertained Babo in every way an esteemed, high-profile defender of the Revolution could be entertained—bequeathing him a palatial seaside home and his own cinematography institute, utmost solitude when he wanted it, first-rate company when he didn’t, and the best goddamn rum, cigars, lobsters, and pussy on the blue-green planet. Babo—el pobre was on his deathbed—remained loyal to the Revolution after all the turncoats had abandoned it like a love affair gone sour. When asked about his unflagging support for Cuba, Babo had famously retorted: “The Revolution might be a mangy, one-eyed cat, but it’s our cat.”

  A cool hand stroked the tyrant’s forehead. For a moment, he pictured his wife forty years younger, surrendering to him after the long trial of winning her heart. Delia displayed the confidence of a woman whose presence had once made grown men collapse to the ground and whimper: “¡Sálvame, mamita!” She was in her sixties now, thick-waisted after bearing him four sons, but her essential nature hadn’t changed. To this day Delia girlishly pored over the Parisian fashion magazines sent to her by diplomatic pouch and never once complained about the tyrant’s other women, or the children he’d recklessly sired (he despised condoms). She’d been content to stay sequestered inside their gated compound, hidden from public scrutiny during her most ravishing years, and devote herself exclusively to him.

  “Mi cielo, how are you feeling?” Delia’s guarapo voice had a hint of sand in it.

  “Like hell itself.”

  “What is it, corazón? Tell me where it hurts.” Her face was pure concern, the space between her eyes creased like a scrap of burlap. But what could he tell her? That every cell in his body was flickering its last? That the pain began in his toes, snaked up through his calcareous feet, burned through the veins and byways of his legs, his groin, his belly, his spine? An unfamiliar tide of defeat rose in his chest.

  “I don’t want to be old anymore.”

  “Ay, to me you’re still El Caballo,” Delia cooed.

  El Caballo. How he’d hated that nickname! The singer Beny Moré had pinned it on him like the tail on a donkey, and it’d stuck for decades. The tyrant permitted no one but Delia to utter it in his presence. He looked up at his wife and tried to whinny like a stallion—this had been their signal for quickie sex, rough and from behind—but it devolved into another fit of coughing. Carajo, nothing was more demoralizing than being old and sick. He grabbed Delia’s wrist. “I want you by my side when I go.”

  “You’re not going anywhere, mi amor,” she said. Then she turned and ordered El Huele Huele to administer a double dose of her husband’s vitamin shots “to lift our commander’s spirits.”

  The injection pinched the crux of his left elbow. The despot suspected that his caretakers were giving him more than B12 and magnesium infusions, but he’d stopped monitoring his health so closely. A pain in his chest cut off his breath, prompting another round o
f violent coughing. It sounded to him like machine-gun fire. He took sips of water from the glass Delia held to his lips, then sank back onto his pillows, exhausted. Of all his infirmities, the incessant choking bothered him most because it interfered with his ability to speak. If he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t cajole, intimidate, or command. Why, in his prime he could’ve persuaded Jesus Christ Himself off the cross and into armed revolt against His Father!

  His old rival, Che, had suffered from chronic asthma, and this had slowed down the rebels in the Sierra Maestra. Half the time, Che was laid up looking like a goddamn saint. At least he’d had the decency to (finally) die young and photogenic while “exporting” revolution to Latin America, thereby becoming the face of radical heroism. That photograph—the one of him in a beret looking beatifically toward the future—was the most ubiquitous image of the twentieth century. Fifteen years ago an anthropology museum in Los Angeles had exhibited its infinite reproductions: refrigerator magnets, T-shirts, designer handbags, flip-flops, even neckties. Add to that a rash of movies and biographies and Che’s myth was ironclad, larded as it was with lies perpetuated by the Revolution itself.

  “What are your plans today, mi amor?” Delia asked, trying to recapture her husband’s attention.

  “You’re asking me my plans?”

  “Don’t get upset, I’m just—”

  “How about staying alive?” The spittle dribbled down his chin, but his wife tenderly wiped it off. Long ago, she’d learned how to handle his tantrums: indulge him like a two-year-old, kiss him sweetly, then bring him rice pudding or ice cream.1 Delia slipped into bed next to him and patted his cheek.

  “You’re my handsome boy,” she chimed.

  “As handsome as Che?”

  “Nobody, mi cielo, alive or dead, has ever been as guapo as you.”

  How it chagrined him to have engineered that asthmatic’s canonization! By the time Che was executed in the jungles of Bolivia, he’d long outlived his usefulness to the Revolution. As an administrator he’d been a disaster, with no more diplomacy than a dung beetle. He’d grown cocky, too, refusing to stay in El Líder’s shadow. Che had needed to die. The despot had merely facilitated the conditions. A Mexican poet of vacillating political allegiances once wrote: “Tell me how you die, and I will tell you who you are.” Bueno, where the hell did that leave him?

  The day he’d handed over the reins of power to his brother was the day he should’ve put a bullet in his brain. Not that Fernando wasn’t doing a creditable job, but the man had the charisma of a box of crackers. What else could you expect from a textbook Communist? Put him onstage before a sea of lights and he froze up, squeezed out a few scripted words as though these pained him, then scurried off into the wings. He’d never been good-looking either. Fernando’s features were artless, flat-bent, as if they’d been weathered down by the elements into a coarse Toltec statue. His eyes, though, were the eyes of a predator.

  Unlike Che, Fernando had willingly spent his life as El Comandante’s sidekick. It was where he felt most at home: watching his brother’s back; eliminating those who would do him harm, real or not. Once in the Sierra Maestra, Fernando had thrown himself in front of an angry soldier threatening the despot with a Garand rifle. Now that was loyalty. In actuality, Fernando was the far more ruthless of the two. He never flinched when he killed anyone, and he slept like a baby. The tyrant liked to joke that, yes, Fernando slept like a baby but a baby with one eye open and a twitchy trigger finger.

  During their guerrilla days, it’d been Fernando who’d insisted on a zero-tolerance policy for infractions deemed punishable by death: stealing, raping, or disrespecting the peasants who were helping them at great personal risk. At the first sign of trouble, the offenders were as good as dead. During the first weeks after the triumph of the Revolution, Fernando also organized the firing squads that rid the island of hundreds of Batista loyalists. In the years that followed, the despot talked his brother out of innumerable more executions. Fernando’s greatest enemies? Poets. He considered them the most unscrupulous and degenerate of men and would’ve done away with all of them, if he could. Fernando couldn’t abide complexity. He was 100 percent macho, too, even in the mountains where the rebels had suffered long stretches of abstinence.

  That was what Cuba needed, more loyal machos like his brother.

  Solidarity

  Did you hear the one about the tree huggers who came to Havana during the Special Period and ate their hosts out of house and home? In those days, street vendors were disguising scummy mop threads with batter and bread crumbs and selling them as fried steaks. Por supuesto, they were chewy, but you have to understand: people were starving. Other descarados were melting Chinese condoms as “cheese” for pizzas.

  Anyway, these tree huggers (they’d been living in the canopies of redwoods in California) got shitfaced one night on the island’s fine rum and had the bright idea of smashing up their hosts’ impeccably preserved 1950s television set and everything else they thought smacked of bourgeois decadence. The comemierdas left the place in ruins, stole the last of their hosts’ toilet paper, and took off without offering to pay for a thing. So much for people-to-people diplomacy.

  —Eusebio López, arborist

  * * *

  1. Aviso: The only manufactured product worth consuming in Cuba is ice cream, preferably mango.

  3.

  (To) Resolve

  Miami

  Goyo settled into his ergonomic chair and turned on his desktop computer. He put on the aviator bifocals that his wife had said made him look like a grasshopper. How bitterly she’d protested over the time he spent online, interspersing her moaning with ancient complaints about his long-dead mother. What Luisa had wanted, had needed more than oxygen, was Goyo’s undivided attention—the one thing he couldn’t give her. He was still shocked that she’d died before him. Her health had been far better than his, and Luisa looked many years younger besides, due to her penchant for plastic surgery. She’d begun with a discreet tummy tuck in her forties, progressing to successive and complex lifts to her face, breasts, and buttocks (all performed by Brazilian plastic surgeons at half the Miami price) and complemented by multiple liposuctions. Luisa had been cut, snipped, tucked, nipped, and sucked so often that her body looked stitched together from disparate parts. Coupled with an eating disorder that had her weight fluctuating a hundred pounds, the surgeries had left her prone to such unpredictable shiftings of flesh that nothing but a neck-to-ankle, extra-strength, beige body girdle could tame the unruly bulges.

  At eighty-two, Luisa’s face had been her crowning glory—radiant, lineless, frequently immobilized by Botox injections and plumped up with collagen. She’d spent the better part of every morning plastering her face with lavish creams made from the glandes of unborn lambs and meticulously applying her makeup. So obsessed had Luisa become with her appearance that she finally convinced Goyo to have a little work done himself during their last trip to Rio. The procedures—an eye lift, fat injections into his hollowing cheeks—had hurt like hell, and Goyo, stir-crazy and unbearably itchy, had ignored the plastic surgeon’s instructions on sun avoidance and postoperative rest.

  When Alina saw him shortly after his return from Brazil, she took one look and blurted out, “What the hell happened to you?” Never one for tact, she added: “Jesus, Dad, you look like a flounder.” It was true. Goyo wasn’t sure how or why it’d happened, but his eyes had somehow drifted closer together, then migrated, slightly, toward the right side of his face.

  At a recent anniversary party for old friends, Goyo had been astonished at how youthful everyone looked until it dawned on him that nearly every octogenarian there was semibionic—artificial hips and knees, shoulder replacements, hair plugs, heart transplants, and a panoply of other age-defying enhancements. With the lights dimmed and the salsa “band” (in actuality, a liver-spotted singer with a synthesizer who did a passable imitation of Beny Moré) in full swing, the guests took to the floor and danced the night a
way, believing—if only for the two minutes and fifteen seconds of Pérez Prado’s “Mambo No. 5”—that the Revolution had never happened.

  Goyo’s in-box was congested with the usual array of right-wing junk mail, penile enhancement ads, and phishing scams. His brother weighed in several times a day, too, ever hopeful about El Comandante’s declining health: WE’LL OUTLIVE HIM YET, HERMANO! Rufino claimed that his wife, Trini, a founding member of a bookkeepers’ prayer circle that promised to work miracles with the IRS, had persuaded its members to devote the month’s orations to ensuring the tyrant’s untimely death. Goyo thought it ridiculous how religious fanatics believed they could sway the Almighty to do their bidding, as if they were divinely anointed lobbyists. God had been ignoring the Cubans’ pleas since before the Wars of Independence. Why should He bother listening to them now?

  Although not a victim of optimism, Goyo rarely succumbed to despair. If he was anything it was a Catholic pragmatist, which wasn’t as contradictory as it sounded. Void, or paradise? Who really knew? Goyo continued to believe because the terror of not believing was worse. Above all, he tried not to let religion interfere with his common sense and took pride in analyzing events in as clear-eyed and dispassionate a manner as possible. Cuba’s difficulties, in his opinion, had been exponentially compounded by its longtime status as a de facto colony of the United States. Goyo had seen the writing on the wall long before those barbudos took to the Sierra Maestra and waited for Batista to fall. A country can take only so much abuse before it implodes. The solution, sadly, turned out to be much worse than the original problem.

  Goyo removed his bifocals and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He pulled a microfiber cloth from his desk drawer, polished his lenses, then turned back to the computer screen. A message bleeped in from his mistress, writing to him from the bank where she worked: HOLA, MI TIGRE. HOW ABOUT A DATE THIS AFTERNOON? BESITOS Y MUCHO MÁS, VILMA. This was followed by a winking smiley face and a series of strange punctuation marks that eluded his comprehension. Goyo enjoyed Vilma’s company—her love was a bright, enameled thing—but their ardent frolicking often exhausted him so completely that he was incapacitated for days afterward. MAYBE, he typed back. I’LL CALL YOU.