King of Cuba

by Cristina Garcia

  The dolphins sidled up to the glass to gaze, brine-eyed, at their most ardent fan.

  “Start the show,” El Comandante barked.

  The lights dimmed, and a trio of lithe divers—two men and a bespangled woman with chapped, forlorn feet—slipped into the water wearing wet suits but no diving equipment. The divers worked in close harmony with the dolphins, gracefully kaleidoscoping into hearts, spirals, and hexagons to the gyrating rhythms of Los Van Van’s greatest hits. Their routines reminded the tyrant of those old Hollywood movies with the swimming starlet Esther Williams (he’d had a crush on her as a young man), except that this music and choreography were far superior.

  After a difficult series of jumps and twists, one of the dolphins nuzzled the female diver and waggled its prodigious tail. The dictator clapped his hands in delight. “Ha, that’s a new one!”

  Everyone present breathed a sigh of relief. With any luck, no one would be upbraided tonight; no one dismissed, or incarcerated for real or imagined crimes.

  “That one’s getting fat,” El Comandante said, singling out the dolphin named Betty. Recently, he’d resuscitated the Revolution’s fitness-for-all campaign from the dark ages. Nobody embraced the idea, least of all Cuba’s gym teachers, who were as overweight and underaerobicized as everybody else.

  One of the veterinarians, a doleful fellow with concave cheeks, stepped forward. “She’s pregnant, Comandante,” Dr. Gutiérrez explained, clicking his rubber heels.

  The tyrant brought his hands together, fingertips touching. “Is she in your charge?”

  “Sí, Comandante.” Dr. Gutiérrez blushed to the tips of his ears, as if it were he who’d impregnated the sorry creature and was now facing her father’s wrath.

  “Where was her chaperone, eh?”

  Everyone remained silent. Mistaking El Comandante’s intentions had proved a fast path to oblivion, or worse.

  “¡Idiotas!” he burst out, laughing.

  The divers energetically resumed their routine, rushing a few backflips. During the finale, the errant Betty torpedoed around the gigantic tank, coquettishly flapping her tail. It seemed to the tyrant—and he was never wrong about such things—that the bitch only had eyes for him.

  No sooner had the dictator returned from the aquarium than the morning’s troubles resumed in full force. The crashing euro meant fewer tourists and trade. Imports to Cuba had fallen 37 percent, ravaging the economy. For months, headlines around the world had been proclaiming the death of the Revolution. Fernando’s attempt to lay off more government workers had backfired. Protests were breaking out in Guantánamo and other cities that the army couldn’t fully contain. By every conceivable measure, it was all a fiasco. Only in Cuba, El Líder thought miserably, did citizens expect to survive without working—and moreover, feel entitled to not working.

  He rang for his breakfast: oatmeal, stewed fruit, multigrain toast that tasted like sawdust. Today was his birthday, goddamnit, so he demanded a cafecito1 and heaped in six teaspoons of sugar. More bad news. There was a record rice shortage in Asia. Cuba’s sugarcane harvest was expected to be worse than last year’s. The ever-optimistic Granma printed the schedule of festivities to be held in honor of the tyrant’s eighty-ninth birthday—parades in Holguín and Camagüey; a dance festival in Trinidad; a workers’ rally on the steps of the Capitol at noon; and, most infuriatingly, the premiere of Bay of Pigs: The Musical! in Cienfuegos.

  That he didn’t already have Fernando’s head on a platter over this abomination attested to his weakness. It was impossible to fight everyone at once. If only he could be like that Bruce Lee, kickboxing his way through a hundred men. Early on in the Revolution, the tyrant had battled his own family first to mute criticism of his policies. Papá’s hacienda was nationalized before any others. His cousin’s sugar refinery was handed over to its workers. After the Revolution took control of the banks, his mother publicly criticized him for displaying “bad manners,” adding: “This is not how I raised my son.” The tyrant couldn’t make her understand that when it came to building a nation, niceties were not a priority.

  Besides, next to the Soviets he was a model of civility. For years El Comandante had endured their endless, vodka-fueled banquets—everyone two-fistedly shoveling in heaps of caviar, sturgeon, sheep’s-cheese sandwiches, balyk (the highly prized dorsal sections of salted or smoked salmon), and those beastly pies, heavy enough to use as artillery shells. What the hell were those pies called? Kulo-something-or-other. Kulo-ban-skas. No, no. Kulebyakas. That was it. Colossal, stupefying pies stuffed with oily fish, congealed meats, cabbage. How he hated that stinking sour cabbage! Like eating out of a urinal. Kitchen sink pies. Why, he’d half-expected to find wrenches or chunks of farm machinery between their leaden crusts. His stomach, at least, had been ironclad then.

  Once, the tyrant had so mangled a toast in Russian that it sent his Kremlin cronies—with their galoshes and greatcoats and dull, barking basses—into paroxysms of laughter. He’d meant to say: “I salute, with fervor, the young men and women of great Mother Russia, whose future in this land is bright.” Instead it came out: “May the lamb-clad maidens of Mother Russia enjoy their bright morning sprats.” Oh, everyone laughed heartily over that one. The mirthless wives with their heaving acreage of breasts. The snubnosed state accordionist, who doubled over with tears in his eyes and stopped playing for a full five minutes. The foreign minister joked: “Our Cuban friend knows as much about Russia as a pig knows about oranges.” More ah-ha-ha! El Comandante never attempted to say anything in Russian again.

  Outside his window, dawn slowly dissolved into day. A squadron of pelicans flew close to shore, dive-bombing the surf for fish. How he would love nothing more than to spend the day fishing like them. A cramp tightened his belly. He winced and shouted for an attendant. An unfamiliar, goggle-eyed man in a pin-striped suit answered his call. The tyrant’s sphincter froze.

  “Who the hell are you?” he said, balking.

  “Compañero Vásquez.”

  “You’re no compañero of mine. Where the hell did you get that suit?”

  “It’s the one you wore for the Pope’s visit. How handsome you looked. The ladies flocked to you anew.”

  The stranger spoke perfect Spanish but with a foreign accent that the dictator couldn’t place. The son of a bitch was probably CIA. “What do you know about it?”

  “People underestimate you at their peril.” Vásquez grinned, displaying a double row of crowded, discolored teeth. “Permit me to wish you the most felicitous of birthdays.”

  “What’s your business here, Vásquez? I can see you’re not armed.”

  “You were expecting an assassin then?”

  “I’m always expecting assassins. How the fuck did you get my suit?”

  “Let’s just say . . . the world recycles its gifts.”

  The tyrant reached for the buzzer that summoned El Conejo. He would boil that rabbit’s head with parsley for this breach of security.

  “It’s no use, Jefe. All connections have been temporarily severed.” Vásquez grinned again, drumming the air with pallid fingers.

  “So you’re here to kill me.” El Comandante eyed his nightstand, where he kept his trusty Browning. Calmly, he opened the drawer and grabbed hold of the pistol. It was a touch dusty but otherwise ready for action. He aimed it at Vásquez.

  “There’s no need for that, Jefe.”

  “I’m counting to three.”

  “You’ll be counting longer in eternity.”

  “You’re the one who’s going to eternity, hijo de puta. One . . .”

  “Put it down and I’ll tell you why I’m here.”

  “Two . . .”

  “It’s about your after—”

  “Three.”

  El Comandante pulled the trigger. The shot erupted with a deafening blast, tearing a hole in the visitor’s thigh. Through it, the tyrant spied the bookshelf where he kept his signed first editions of Babo’s novels.

  “Afterlife,” Vásqu
ez repeated without a hint of aggression. “You were trained by the Jesuits, no?”

  The tyrant studied his still-smoking pistol. His thumb was bleeding where the hammer had hit it. His shoulder hurt like the devil, too. El Comandante looked up at Vásquez and felt ice in his chest. Was it heartburn, or fear? It’d been so long since he’d actually been afraid of anyone that he barely recognized the signs.

  “My legacy is my afterlife, idiot. Here on the island, with my people.”

  “Then you don’t believe in the transmigration of souls?”

  The despot was tired of playing games. He slapped his own face, trying to wake himself up from this nightmare. Those fucking sleeping pills were to blame.

  “You shot me through the leg and I’m still here.” Vásquez waggled a finger through the charred hole to illustrate his point.

  “That proves only that you’re a figment of my imagination. You don’t exist, asshole. Listen, hand me a cigar from that box over there.”

  Vásquez, or whoever he was, lifted the mahogany lid of the humidor and removed a puro. He held it to his nose. “De primera.”

  “Take one for yourself,” El Comandante offered, and Vásquez did.

  Vásquez struck a light by snapping his fingers and held them first to the tip of the tyrant’s cigar and then to his own.

  “Nice trick.” The tyrant was enjoying this now, surrendering to the fantasy.

  “You don’t have much time left, Jefe,” Vásquez said, blowing immaculate smoke rings toward the ceiling. He puffed out his cheeks and with a few quick contortions of his lips, blew out a smoky replica of the Greater Antilles.

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Your death will be heroic.”

  “I would expect no less.”

  “You have many enemies.”

  “Are you one of them?” the tyrant asked, repositioning a pillow.

  “Jefe, trust me. I’m your ally.”

  “Then enough chatter, Vásquez. Have some respect and shut the fuck up.”

  The two of them sat smoking for a while in silence. This Vásquez was no amateur when it came to handling a fine cigar. El Comandante’s respect for him grew. It was difficult to make new friends at his age. People either shunned him out of fear and hatred or groveled obsequiously out of the same fear and hatred. To sit companionably with this stranger mitigated the weight of his loneliness somehow. Bueno, if Vásquez was the Devil, at least he’d be assured of decent company in hell.

  “Where did you say you were from?”

  “I didn’t.” Vásquez was working on a wispy chart of the solar system.

  “You an astronomer?”

  “I suppose you could say that.”

  “A reader of stars then?”

  “If you wish.”

  “Carajo, it doesn’t matter. You feel very—”

  “Dare I say ‘brotherly’?”

  “Jesus, I want to fucking ring his neck for what he’s done. There isn’t a soul on this island I can trust anymore. But you probably know that already.”

  “I do.”

  The smoke lazily encircled them.

  “So how much time do I have left?” El Comandante tapped an inch of ash off his cigar into a Venetian glass ashtray.

  “This business of time is tricky. Nowhere in the universe is it as divided and wasted as it is here.”

  “You mean in Cuba?” The despot pushed himself up onto one elbow, ready to take offense.

  “Don’t get your hackles up, Jefe. I meant on this planet.” The last of Saturn’s rings disintegrated. A replica of the Milky Way followed.

  El Comandante grew drowsy. He didn’t have the same stamina for staying up all night and shooting the breeze. “I’m eighty-nine years old today.”

  “Again, my felicidades.” Vásquez stood up and delicately stubbed out his cigar. The hole in his leg had vanished. “It’s time for me to go.”

  “Come back anytime,” the tyrant offered with genuine hospitality. “Don’t worry about protocol.” He cackled at his own joke, and saliva collected at the corners of his mouth.

  Vásquez disappeared through the closed door. The dictator inspected his room. Everything remained the same except for the smoky constellation near the ceiling—the North Star, Orion, the dippers, large and small. He finished his cigar. The morning stood still. The same pelicans hovered by the shore, diving for the same translucent fish. The same clouds cast their gauzy shadows on the sea. If he closed his eyes, El Comandante mused, might he stop time indefinitely?

  Soon he dozed off. He dreamt that it was daybreak and he was floating in the air like one of the pelicans, gazing down on his near-naked, lifeless body. It was displayed, unceremoniously, on a metal operating table. His corpse sported a winter hat with earflaps like his Russian comrades used to wear. People gathered around him, parasols flaring open against the sun. Two or three men came closer, sniffing like stray dogs, their faces edged with malice. They pointed at his sagging chest, the slackness of his thighs, his gouty, unsheathed feet.

  A seamstress with pins in her mouth pushed through the crowd and began to take his measurements, as if for a new suit, except that she measured extraneous details: the distance between his radial ears; the length of his incisors (she pulled back his cracked lips to check); his fingers, stiff as flagpoles; the at-rest dimensions of his penis nestled against his bloated balls. A beam of light suddenly illuminated his corpse. The steel table beneath him rose heavenward—up, up, up into the feathery clouds—before reversing direction and dropping like a broken elevator. The crowd scattered as the steel table cratered the ground. No one was left at his grave site—if, indeed, it was his grave site—except for Compañero Vásquez, dressed in a sulfur-colored suit and twirling a gold-tipped walking stick.

  “Amigo,” Vásquez called to him, exuding sympathy, “we mustn’t take pity on our own misfortunes.”

  Limbo

  I studied to become a lawyer only to realize that there is no point to this career. What can you do as a lawyer here when the laws are arbitrary and change from day to day? You can lose your house, your job, your reputation, if the state decides this is your fate. That’s what happened to my Tío Rolando, a thoracic surgeon, after he applied to leave the country. He’s become a pariah. His children can no longer attend school. Officially, his whole family doesn’t exist. They’ll live in this limbo for as many months or years as it takes for them to escape. Now I’m studying to become an air traffic controller. The work isn’t subject to interpretation. The plane lands safely, or it doesn’t. There is no ambiguity. No margin for error.

  —Margarita Bofill, aviation student

  * * *

  1. The coffee tastes better since they started mixing in the chickpeas. It was too bitter before. I don’t know if the coffee in Baracoa is different than in Havana, but I’m telling you it’s smoother. Let me make you a cup and you can judge for yourself.

  —Magdalena Alvarez, truck driver

  10.

  Myths

  Durham, North Carolina

  Goyo settled on a garish cushion next to his son and watched the seminaked harlequins slither up and down the glistening poles. There were seven dancers altogether, but Goyo was fixated on the skinny, pliable one. She looked soft in spite of her acrobatics, boneless, as if any man could shape her flesh to his needs. Goyito was wearing a Mexican poncho and a bear mask, an outfit he claimed protected him from malevolent forces. His Great Dane, the indomitable Rudy, waited in the parking lot in Goyo’s newly repaired Cadillac, the windows open, a chewed rawhide in the mangled backseat. How the hell had they ended up in this strip joint on the outskirts of Durham, the obesity capital of America, on a jag of father-son debauchery?

  The tempo picked up as the dancers, long-legged variations of one another, approached the cheering patrons in Rockettes fashion. They kicked their legs high, leaving nothing to the imagination. Goyo found this display distasteful in the extreme. A woman’s treasure wasn’t meant to be paraded in such sho
rn, unseemly quantities. It seemed to Goyo that what this dancing offered—if such gyrations could be called dancing—appealed not so much to the audience’s groins as to their feeble hopes. As a theatrical production, it was a disaster.

  His son cheered the women on along with the other men, who summoned the dancers with ten- and twenty-dollar bills. Goyito had singles, which he held out in threes or fives (he had a fear of even numbers). He was probably not much different from the strip club regulars—neither talented nor burdened with superior intelligence nor extraordinary in any way. He had one unpardonable zeal: cocaine. All the rest was shaped by habit and a paucity of imagination.

  Goyito thumped the cocktail table with the heel of his hand, rousing the curiosity of the boneless girl.

  “Hi, Papa Bear,” she growled, baring teeth so tiny they might’ve been her milk teeth. Boneless Girl’s nacreous flesh seemed to shimmy in every direction at once.

  Reluctantly, Goyo thought of his son’s penis. It hadn’t been circumcised—only the Jews in Cuba were circumcised—but the boy, in a drug-addled frenzy, had attempted a do-it-yourself circumcision at sixteen.

  A string of vermilion lights flashed, signaling the dancers to retreat. Hips and breasts blooming with cash, they launched into a disco number. Goyo escaped the smoky club and hobbled outside. Cement clamshell fountains furred with mold framed the entrance. The parking lot was packed with locals and drive-through travelers. Goyito had begged his father to take him to Durham en route to New York so that he could enroll at the Rice House. Luisa had spent many months and thousands of dollars shedding extra pounds at its weight-loss program.