King of Cuba

by Cristina Garcia

  The night was oppressively humid. Goyo’s every gesture seemed to indent the air. He closed his eyes for a moment, watching the pink quivering of his lids under the bright parking lot lights. Then he reached into his guayabera pocket for the cigar he’d been saving. He lit a match and held it to the tip, puffing until the compressed leaves embraced the flame. The smoke soothed his throat, seeped through his nostrils, rolled along his palate.

  A fragrant scrim enveloped him. To surrender to a good cigar was to deny time’s tyranny. As he smoked, Goyo had the disconcerting feeling that he was mirroring the tyrant’s movements. Back at the university, people had often mistaken the two of them. They’d both been tall and handsome then, and were known to drop Latin aphorisms into casual conversations. But Goyo had been a political moderate in his youth, the opposite of that firebrand thug who was always on one hit list or another. Everyone knew he’d murdered a fellow student over some barbaric nonsense.1

  The unfamiliar sounds of the North Carolina night unsettled Goyo. He couldn’t identify a single birdsong, and the crickets ground out an alien whirring. Above him, at least, the skies were embossed with the same moon and stars. The older he got, the more vividly his memories of Cuba returned—its dialects, its minerals, its underground caves, its guajiros, its hummingbirds, its fish, its chaos, its peanut vendors, its Chinese lotteries, its cacophonies, its myths, its terrors. Maybe this was what happened when a man approached death; senility and longing conspired to overtake reality. Perhaps Cuba had become nothing but an imaginary place, unrelated to any truth. Goyo looked down at his feet, which loomed closer every day. Coño, there was no denying his diminution. He recalled, much chagrined, how his daughter had ridiculed his wished-for epitaph: Here lies a Cuban hero. The last thing he wanted was to die another forgettable, brooding exile in the heart of discontent.

  A stirring at the edge of the parking lot caught Goyo’s attention. A pudgy creature waddled out from a tangle of weeds. Its striped tail was unmistakable. It turned to face him, point-blank and accusatory, as if to say: Et tu, Goyo? The raccoon reminded him of his old social studies teacher, Father Antonio Beixet, with his triangular Spanish face and parchment skin. The Spaniard’s favorite saying was Fortes fortuna adiuvat. Fortune favors the bold. At one of his high school reunions, Goyo learned that Father Antonio had died from septicemia in 1973, at a retirement home for Jesuits in rural Indiana.

  A plane blinked across the moon’s path. What would Father Antonio have thought of him today? What sort of life had he led, with its myopic concern for money and material comforts, its fundamental cowardice? The sacerdotal raccoon sat on its hindquarters, frozen, its front paws outstretched like calipers. Goyo’s cigar burned, unsmoked. He spat a speck of tobacco off his tongue. He was on his way to New York, to the United Nations, where the tyrant would speak next month. The distance between the mortal and the divine, Goyo thought, might still be bridged with one decisive act.

  Island Blogger 1

  Have you noticed how many of the children of our so-called leaders live as exiles in Spain, France, or the United States? The offspring of our elite, with all their privileges, don’t choose to live in the society their parents built. Why? Because real revolutions, good citizens, don’t last over half a century . . .

  La Cabaña

  El Comandante scrutinized the hunger strikers lined up before him—skeletal misfits with protruding ribs and gray, sunken cheeks. Their leader, Orlando Martínez, had succeeded in starving himself to death, increasing the media spotlight on the survivors. They were ordinary men, for the most part, a choir of nobodies. Here in the most feared penitentiary in the Caribbean, dissidents were meant to perish anonymously, like the thousands before them. Instead the six (now five) hunger strikers had become martyrs, their stories and images disseminated worldwide.

  The ragtag prisoners stood facing the tyrant in the warden’s spartan office, its only adornment a framed photograph of the Maximum Leader himself. Each dissident displayed the usual marks of torture—cigarette burns, broken ribs, gouges and wounds of varying shapes and depths—on his bare torso. None had caved yet under the psychological pressure. It was critical to get the upper hand with these morally righteous wretches, El Comandante thought. They were infinitely more difficult to deal with than garden-variety thugs and drug traffickers. The hunger strikers’ bodies had become contentious political terrain and a public relations debacle for the Revolution. He wasn’t going to let these malcontents beat him at his own game.

  At first the despot matched their silence with his own, waiting for one of them to crack. An almost imperceptible electricity united the men, but they didn’t exchange so much as a glance. Who knew what these five had in common? Juan Collante, a former copper factory foreman. Rigoberto Alves, the baroquely disgraced physics professor who’d tried—and failed—to escape Cuba fourteen times. Carlos Matamoros, a Havana hairdresser and seller of fake Partagás cigars. Mario Benes, a war hero from Angola who’d left his cushy colonel’s job in the provinces to fight the Revolution from within. And the kid, barely nineteen, Antonio Zaldívar, an emaciated street hustler turned informant turned dissident.

  “I am here,” El Comandante began slowly, “not, as you may believe, out of hatred, or disdain, or fear—don’t flatter yourselves there—but out of concern.” He paused to let this sink in. “I, too, was imprisoned once, reviled and abandoned. One’s flesh, one’s spirit remembers such things. No one came to me, as I am coming to you today, to offer forgiveness and redemption. Perhaps, like you, I would’ve been too proud to accept such gifts. In those days I was blinded by rage and a sense of my own destiny, of our island’s destiny. I’m sure you would agree that my passions were not misplaced?”

  Only the kid dared look at him, shaking a skinny leg with impatience. The tyrant decided to ignore the impudence. He ordered the heavily cologned warden and all military and prison personnel to leave the room. El Comandante wanted to be alone with the dissidents. Of course, he would’ve preferred to speak to each of them individually—divide them, conquer them—but he had neither the time nor the stamina for that. Once in the Sierra Maestra, he’d devoted an entire night to convincing one of his own delinquent soldiers (he’d stolen a pig and seduced a peasant girl) that he must die by firing squad at daybreak to make credible the revolutionary cause.

  “I am a part of you, inside you, in your bloodstream—and I’m not going away,” El Comandante continued. “You won’t escape me, even in death. So why not choose to partake of life, to join me in making history?”

  This seemed more than the hunger strikers could bear. They twitched and looked at the floor, the ceiling, anywhere but at him. Finally the kid erupted, his face distorted by rage: “The only history you’ve made on this fucking island is shit.”

  “Cállate, estúpido,” the copper foreman hissed.

  El Comandante smiled. Already, he was chipping away at the group’s primary resolve—to refuse to engage with him. This was progress. Now it was time for a little provocation. “Punk,” the tyrant sneered. “You’re too weak to even jerk off.”

  “I’ll fucking show you who can’t jerk off!” Antonio yelled, and pulled down his prison pants. His cock was huge and purplish hard. “Let’s see what you’ve got, faggot!”

  A pair of military police stormed in and dragged away the hustler, his penis bouncing off their thighs, his insults echoing against the ancient stone walls: Este país es una mierdaaaaaa . . . El Comandante shrugged off the incident as if it were nothing more than an inconvenient stirring of dust. “The, eh, incommodities you’ve suffered in prison are nothing compared to what you’re inflicting on yourselves, on the Revolution that nurtured you. Our bodies are fragile—I know this better than any of you—and it won’t be easy recovering from the trials to which you’re submitting your kidneys, your livers, and most especially your hearts.”

  The tyrant signaled with a wave of his hand, and the banished personnel returned. “Are we ready?”

  “Sí, Jefe.�
�� The warden practically saluted. He was the son of a rehabilitated Batista henchman, and devoutly pro-revolution. He’d lost a leg to diabetes but still moved with the vigor of a biped.

  “Follow me,” the tyrant said in his most seductive voice. It was the voice that those who knew him feared most. The voice that ordered men thrown from helicopters, hands and feet bound, into the Caribbean. A merciless voice.

  With the warden at his side, El Comandante led the unlikely procession through the prison, past fetid labyrinths of cells where inmates gnawed on their own flesh to stave off hunger. They shouted out to him, begged him for clemency, cursed and praised him in equal measure. It was a vision of hell, a stench for the ages. Carajo, Fernando had assured him that they’d cleaned up the place for his arrival. Prisons were his brother’s bailiwick, the part of his portfolio he’d once enjoyed most. The tyrant hadn’t set foot in here since the onset of the Revolution. Their worst political enemies had waited within these walls before their summary trials and executions. Not much had changed.

  The dissidents shuffled together behind El Comandante, ankles enchained, moving as one tentacular beast. Their destination: the warden’s private dining hall, where a rustic banquet table was set with china and water and wine glasses and a dusty arrangement of plastic daffodils. With a sweep of his arm, the tyrant invited the hunger strikers to lunch. The guards unfastened the prisoners and forced each one to take a seat. As the waiters poured the Spanish rioja, the despot sat at the head of the table, beaming with self-satisfaction. The first course was a steaming ajiaco chock-full of green bananas, yuca, and chunks of pork. El Comandante dug in, lifting a spoonful to his lips.

  “Mmm, delicioso. Mamá used to make this every Sunday when I was a boy. Won’t you try some?” He looked placidly from one man to another.

  The tension in the room spiked lethally, but the prisoners said nothing. A row of electric bulbs glared down on them from the ceiling, and a stuttering fan overhead suddenly stopped. An open floor-to-ceiling window overlooked the sea but, strangely, admitted no breeze. The stifling dining room and the agonizing fragrance of the stew made the hunger strikers all pour sweat. Not a single one picked up a spoon. After an interminable moment, Juan Collante lifted his water glass to his lips and sipped in silence. The others followed suit.

  El Comandante dabbed his mouth with a white linen napkin (it could easily have doubled as a blindfold) and ordered that the next course be served: lobster-stuffed avocados. The prisoners’ nostrils flared as they struggled to ignore their appetizers. Most of the lobsters caught off Cuba’s coasts were exported, or reserved for tourists. The odds were high—the tyrant relished the thought—that these troublemakers hadn’t seen a lobster in decades.

  Without warning, the physics professor rose to his feet and stretched his arms wide, as if being fitted for a crucifix. His eyes were burning, feverish looking. The guards made a move to restrain him, but El Comandante held them off with a raised finger.

  “Does the professor have something to impart to us?” the tyrant asked, spearing a hunk of lobster with his fork.

  Rigoberto Alves broke out in loud laughter, knocking over the untouched rioja and his lobster-stuffed avocado. “I prefer my lobster grilled with butter sauce,” he pronounced. Then he flapped his arms, the wingbeat akin to a turkey vulture’s or a great brown pelican’s, and raced to the window overlooking the sea. Without hesitating, he threw himself out of it, wheeling into the air with astonishing grace, hovering for the length of a holy incantation, the summer day’s haze outlining him as if he were a shimmering, stained-glass saint. Alves dropped three stories and landed, chin first, in a spray of blood and bone, interrupting the prisoners in the courtyard, who were practicing for a much-anticipated Sunday soccer match against the guards.

  “He chose his own penance,” El Comandante said tersely, recalling how Che used to dine at the firing squads. “No sense in ruining a perfectly good luncheon.” He signaled to the waiters, who brought in an enormous earthenware casserole of chicken and rice festooned with asparagus, roasted red peppers, and petits pois. They served heaping platefuls to the pale, shaken dissidents.

  The ex-colonel stood up and took a clumsy step toward the tyrant. His legs were short for such a tall man, and his left hand was withered from an army accident. His people had been cane cutters and tenant farmers back in Oriente. Without the Revolution, Benes would’ve been nothing. His ingratitude was particularly galling.

  “You wish to make a statement, Benes?” The prison visit was going better than El Comandante had expected. All he had to do was show up and the hunger strikers self-destructed one by one.

  Benes cleared his throat, endlessly it seemed. “When I get out of here, dead or alive,” he said, his voice cracking, “I will tell everyone about the barbarity of your so-called revolution. Far and wide, to the living and to the dead, I will tell the truth: that you are a manipulator of facts and men, anything but a true revolutionary—”

  “That’s enough, Mario!” Collante interrupted him.

  “No one gives a shit what you have to say,” El Comandante said, reaching for a roll and meticulously buttering it. “In fact, no one gives a shit what any of you have to say.”

  “So why the hell are you here?” the hairdresser lashed out. “Your time is over, viejo. History has already issued its verdict: your revolution is a fracaso!”

  The tyrant cut into a seared chicken breast bursting with the subtle taste of saffron. He had them where he wanted them—agitated and impotent. Their resolve was waning, he could sense it. They were feeble, ravenous, worn out.

  “Bring cerveza,” he ordered the waiters, who quickly placed an ice-cold beer before each dissident.

  El Comandante studied his opponents’ eyes, glazing but still wary. It was the time of day when the entire island came to a standstill in deference to the sun. Soon the dissidents’ hatred would lapse into exhaustion, as hatred invariably did. Collante picked up his empty water glass and raised it toward the waiters, who didn’t move a muscle. They would drink the beer or they would drink nothing. The tyrant scraped up the last grains of rice with his fork. His appetite was unusually robust today, fueled by the pleasure of battle. “We must make our peace with the necessity of dying.” He paused, glancing toward the window. “But remember this: you won’t create a new solar system in which I am not the sun. Even after I’m gone, the heat of my presence will be felt.”

  “You have no feelings except ambition and vanity!” Matamoros shouted.

  “Where would any of us be without ambition or vanity?” El Comandante retorted with a tinge of exasperation. If he didn’t keep his emotions in check, he might be tempted to throw the lot of them to the sharks and invite more grief upon his regime—and just when he was trying to restore its tarnished reputation. He must deflect their hatred as he had the countless assassination attempts against him.

  A fly buzzed over the dissidents’ untouched plates. At last, the foreman could no longer hold himself back. “The world you are leaving us is broken, Jefe,” he said quietly. “Let another generation try to make something from the ruins. As it is, we’re all sentenced to death.”

  “You’re an intelligent man,” El Comandante said, trying to contain his fury. “What are you doing with these losers?” An errant cockroach scuttled near his foot, and he crushed it, almost absently, with the toe of his heavy black boot. He snapped his fingers for dessert, a coconut flan baked in the shape of the island and floating in a sea of caramel syrup. After the waiters served each man a generous portion, the despot requested a box of cigars. “No calories there, pendejos,” he laughed. “You can light up with a free conscience.”

  A knock on the door interrupted the luncheon. The prison dentist, Doctora Tomasa Firmat, strode in with her black bag of drills and amalgams and a low-level euphoria that resulted from her free access to anesthetics. Once a month she visited La Cabaña with the express purpose of extracting teeth. On the days Dr. Firmat appeared, the screams in the prison were
more dreadful than usual.

  “Good afternoon, Jefe,” she said cheerfully, a mustache of perspiration glistening on her upper lip. Circles of sweat also dampened the underarms of her white physician’s coat. “I’m here to check on one of the hunger strikers.”

  The tyrant looked around and noticed, for the first time, that the left side of the foreman’s face was terribly swollen. El Comandante savored his flan, watching as the no-nonsense dentist withdrew a clawlike instrument from her bag. She bent over Collante with a dramatic flair and inserted the metal claw into his mouth. Collante moaned, pitiably, to the creaking, sucking sound of bone separating from flesh. A moment later, the triumphant dentist brandished the infected molar, bloody roots and all. The prisoners stared at one another, then down at their desserts. What more awaited them at this interminable meal? El Comandante cleaned his plate and, rubbing his stomach, made a show of refusing seconds. La dentista cauterized the site where Collante’s tooth had been, stuffed a wad of sterile gauze in its place, bid everyone a good day, and departed with her drills and clinking implements.

  Collante held his cheek with one hand and reached for a proffered cigar with the other. The tyrant was pleased to see that the foreman would not refuse a Cohiba even after his ordeal. Following his lead, the hairdresser and ex-colonel each tentatively took a cigar. They lit them and leaned back against their chairs, enveloped in clouds of smoke. The cigars seemed to soothe their jangled nerves, tamp down their hunger pangs, their proclivity for self-destruction. A man didn’t kill himself, El Comandante knew, while smoking a good cigar.

  The tyrant stifled a yawn. He was overcome with drowsiness after the heavy meal. “Your legacy,” he said, “is a negative imprint that will fade in a matter of weeks.”