King of Cuba

by Cristina Garcia

  “One can’t predict the caprices of history,” Collante mumbled as he pulled the bloody gauze from his mouth. “Sometimes the paths of logic and folly are one.”

  Since when had this asshole become a philosopher? The tyrant refused to be lectured at by someone whose very education was made possible by the Revolution. The waiters cleared the hunger strikers’ plates. They would take the leftovers home to their families. It was one of the perks of the job.

  “Take them away,” El Comandante ordered, finishing his cigar, and the guards reappeared to enchain the prisoners and escort them back to their cells.

  * * *

  1. The student’s name was Patricio Canseco, and he was the tyrant’s most dangerous political opponent, dangerous only because he’d grown extremely popular. Canseco’s assassination set the tone for the tyrant’s later intolerance of his enemies.

  —Adolfo Ochoa, historian in exile

  11.

  Birthday

  The South

  The morning was so hot that only children moved with any semblance of energy. Goyo had walked these same streets with Luisa twenty years ago wearing squeaky new sneakers—the first pairs either had ever owned. They’d started exercising gradually, trudging along the nearby college’s symmetrical paths. Wealthy, corpulent dieters from around the world lumbered alongside them like so many dinosaurs. On rainy days the lot of them trooped over to the indoor shopping mall, forming a colorful parade in their size quadruple-X sweats.

  Goyo drove his son to the Devil’s Diner, renowned as the best place for a last meal before commencing the Rice House diet. The diner’s cinnamon buns were legendary, each larger than an infant’s head. Goyo and his son slid into a red vinyl booth and accepted the photo menus from the waitress. The offerings verged on the porno graphic: caloric sundaes erotically glistening with pecans; slabs of ham like a chorus line of delectable thighs; deep-fried Oreos smothered under scoops of candy-flecked ice cream. Across the ceiling, giant ventilation shafts sucked up the copious grease fumes.

  Goyito selected breakfast specials numbers three and seven: six fried eggs, a double portion of cheese grits, two cinnamon buns, a pound of country ham, home fries, a stack of flapjacks, a basket ‘o biskits [sic], bottomless orange juice, and a pot of coffee. Goyo ordered a half grapefruit with a bowl of raisin bran (to help relieve a two-day bout of constipation). He shook out his medications onto an oversize napkin and swallowed the pills with a glass of tomato juice. When their orders arrived, Goyito calmly and meticulously devoured his breakfast. His focus was impressive, his manners impeccable. His lineless face seemed outside time. He wielded his knife and fork with aplomb, dabbed his mouth at regular intervals, and dispatched his grits like soup, decorously tipping the bowl away from his torso.

  Goyo scrutinized the other customers, who also were tucking into manifold platters of food. His son, at five four and nearly three hundred pounds, was among the largest. Goyito called over the waitress and ordered a slice of pecan pie à la mode for dessert. Weeks had elapsed since Goyito had professed a desire to kill himself. He wasn’t on the streets, or in jail, or in a mental hospital with his arms straitjacketed across his chest and a rubber clamp between his teeth. This, at least, was progress. Outside, a pair of boat-tailed grackles hopped and screeched under a crepe myrtle’s blossom-draped limbs. Goyo tried to catch his son’s eye, but he was too busy delicately scraping the last of the pecan pie off his plate.

  At the Rice House, Goyo wrote a sizable check for his son’s weight-loss program. He signed his name at the bottom of a stack of paperwork next to Goyito’s spidery scrawl. Sometimes Goyo guiltily wished for another son, one he might’ve loved without reserve, with whom he might’ve been friends at this stage of life, a son he could brag about to his friends, who had, above all, a capacity for happiness. Goyito had been the most sensitive in the family. When he was a boy, his nerves seemed to trail from his body like fibers of light. What else, Goyo lamented, could he have done to save him?

  Soon Goyito would submit to the rigors of eating the daily fare of hundreds of millions of Asians. Their dietary habits formed the basis of the Rice House’s “revolutionary” approach to eating: a modest portion of white rice topped with steamed vegetables and “seasoned” with specks of animal protein. Only Americans, Goyo thought, would pay thousands of dollars to be meagerly fed, spartanly housed, and monitored by humorless nurses.

  Goyo joined his son for the inaugural meal. They sat at a table with a voluminous woman from Dallas and a goateed Venezuelan who, despite his considerable bulk, gave off a playboy air. It turned out that the playboy was heir to an oil fortune in Caracas. His self-professed downfall: sweet fried plantains. He admitted to eating them by the boatload. The mood was grim during the first course, a scant bowl of vegetable broth. It was tasteless and needed salt, but no saltshakers were permitted. At the other tables, the regulars had the unmistakable gray cast of prison inmates. Goyito consumed his broth with the same imperturbability he’d displayed toward his grits.

  The rest of lunch—white rice, dry-grilled eggplant, a microscopic portion of minced chicken—worsened Goyo’s disposition. He’d paid twenty dollars as a guest for this unspeakable meal, which had cost the Rice House thieves less than fifty cents. This was on top of the forty-three dollars he’d shelled out for brunch, the thirty-five-hundred-dollar deposit for Goyito’s first two weeks here, and the kennel-and-kibble fees for Rudy at a local pet resort. Everything about the place depressed Goyo. The shabby clapboard structure painted a minimalist gray. The bulbous TV set from the seventies. The garden, colorless except for a few anemic tomato vines. The not so subliminal message was clear: tame your excesses. If this were a country, Goyo thought, its citizens would be clamoring to emigrate.

  After a dessert of mealy sliced pears in sugar-free syrup, it was time to get back on the road. Goyito buried his head in his father’s chest. No matter that he was loco de remate, his son loved him with a child’s vast innocence. The two walked arm in arm to the Cadillac and together adjusted a droopy side mirror. Goyo could’ve used a nap, but he was anxious to continue his trip. As his son frantically waved, Goyo pulled down the gravel driveway and onto the sleepy streets of Durham, then out toward the interstate that would take him to New York.

  A hundred miles flew by as Goyo sped through the dense foliage of the South. He wanted to make it to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., before nightfall, check into a nice hotel, order a top sirloin from room service. He fiddled with his XM radio, scanning its two-hundred-plus stations. A Yankees game was under way—another dead heat with the Red Sox. The Yankees pitcher threw behind a right-handed slugger, and the Red Sox bench emptied as the batter charged the mound. Goyo remembered his own days as a third baseman—that triple play he’d made, catching the ball, stepping on third, throwing to first before the stumbling runner could get back. The crowd had gone crazy. Go-yo! Go-yo! For twenty-four hours he dreamt himself into the majors—until the next game, when he caught his cleat on the pitcher’s mound running to position and flopped 360 degrees. He got his second standing ovation in as many days.

  At a gas station in rural Virginia—his Cadillac was an unrepentant guzzler—Goyo noticed the billboard for an indoor shooting range down the road. Five pickup trucks filled the lot. Goyo extracted his Glock from the glove compartment and slipped it into his waistband. Leaning hard on his cane, he headed inside. He tried not to think of the arguments he’d had with his daughter over his possession of weapons. During their last debate, she’d stopped him cold with the question “Is there a gun that can’t kill the owner of the gun?” Alina might be crazy, Goyo thought, but she was whip smart.

  A couple of country boys idled behind the counter. They were respectful enough, gushing their “yes, sirs” and “sure things.” The freckled one did most of the talking. Goyo examined the assortment of firearms on display: AK47s, twelve-gauge shotguns, .357 Smith & Wesson Magnums. He was tempted to try one of the semiautomatics, but he wasn’t here to play. “
Give me thirty rounds of nine millimeters,” Goyo said, trying to countrify his accent a bit, though the clerks had probably seen his Florida plates on the security cameras. They asked him to fill out a disclaimer stating that he wasn’t mentally incompetent, a fugitive from the law, or involved in a violent domestic dispute. Then he surrendered his driver’s license.

  “Nineteen twenty-nine.” The freckled boy whistled. His expression matched that of the longhorn sheep trophy on the wall behind him. Where the hell had they hunted that? Goyo declined the boy’s offer to load the magazine. For years he’d kept his Glock tucked under the diner’s cash register. He’d never shot anyone, but he’d waved the gun around enough times to spread the word that he was packing. When you rehearsed something long enough, its reality became more likely. After what’d happened in Cuba, he wasn’t about to let some punk take anything else away from him.

  The blasts from the other shooters jarred Goyo, even with his ear protectors on. In one booth, a sloppy-looking woman shot off a rifle, muttering: “Oh yeah, baby, you gonna pay.” Goyo set up at the far station. He steadied his shoulder against the cinder-block wall and pushed five rounds into the magazine. He sent the target out forty feet, farther than the deadly accuracy the Glock promised at closer range. A cramp pinched the arch in one foot, but he ignored the pain. The Glock felt solid in his hands. He straightened his right arm, stabilizing it with his left, both thumbs forward. Then he lined up the sights, and exhaled. One easy squeeze should do it. Así. Straight to the heart.

  Havana

  When El Comandante awoke from his nap, he found his brother waiting at his bedside, eyes bloodshot from drinking.

  “Cojones, help me to the crapper.” This was as close to an olive branch as the tyrant ever offered.

  Fernando jumped to readiness and guided him to the toilet. “We’ve got a birthday rally at the Capitol,” he said, standing guard as the despot took a shit. “Everyone and their canaries will be singing you ‘Happy Birthday.’ ”

  El Comandante half-smiled.

  “Of course, you’ll want to say a few words,” Fernando went on, encouraged. “Then we’re going to fly you to Cienfuegos for—”

  “Pa’ carajo—”

  “I brought Mejías here to give you assurances.”

  “You what?” The tyrant reached for his bathrobe.

  “Give him three minutes of your time. If you’re still against it, we’ll cancel the whole thing. But remember, people have come from all over the world to celebrate with you. The presidents of Mexico and Brazil are here, leaders of seven African nations, ambassadors and foreign ministers from another twenty-four. And there’s a big Hollywood contingent.”

  “Who?” El Comandante couldn’t contain his curiosity.

  “What’s her name? The one who rode that mechanical bull in—”

  “That was years ago, Fernando.”

  “Believe me, she still looks great. I saw her at a reception at the Hotel Nacional last night. She asked for you.”

  “Everyone asks for me.”

  “She used your first name.”

  The tyrant softened. “How did it sound?”

  “What?”

  “My name. In her mouth.”

  “Puro guarapo, hermano. Puro guarapo.”

  They both laughed. Despite Fernando’s more straitlaced nature, the brothers had occasionally shared lovers in the early days of the Revolution. Their tastes overlapped just enough to have made these arrangements interesting. For a time, Fernando had been obsessed with Maria Callas. Poor bastard. He never worked up the courage to invite her to Cuba, much less try to seduce her. If the tyrant had felt the slightest attraction for that Greek diva, he would’ve shown Fernando how it could be done. No woman—not even the greatest soprano in the world—was out of his reach.

  He rolled his eyes. “Bring in the fool then.”

  Fernando retreated before his brother could change his mind and returned with Orestes Mejías. El Comandante took inventory of the man. So this was the faggot who’d dared defy him with his counterrevolutionary plays? Mejías’s face was pear-shaped and disfigured, no doubt from prison beatings, and his skin had a typhoid tinge. He wore baggy, checkered trousers and yellow shoes with rubber treads, obviously black-market purchases. His left eye was bruised shut, but the right one, a muddy green, looked around the room with anguish. It seemed to take in everything, down to the crooked straw in the tyrant’s watered-down orange juice.

  It’d taken the island’s best detectives three weeks to track down Mejías, half starved and eaten alive by mosquitoes in the Zapata Swamp, a stone’s throw from the Bay of Pigs. The playwright had been surviving on crabs.1 He had cojones. That much the despot would give him. Not like the vast majority of maricones he’d had locked up in concentration camps in the sixties. Most of them had fucking died of melodrama. Not a single one ever changed his sexual orientation, no matter how many “reeducation” denials they’d signed.

  Mejías said nothing at first, biting his knuckles until they bled. Then, as if electrically prodded, the playwright released a flood of words. The new musical, Mejías insisted, would be a showcase for both El Líder and the Revolution. Blah, blah, blah. The more he talked, the more the bastard’s confidence grew. Yet there was something wrathful in his expression that the tyrant mistrusted. Who would give a damn if one of Fernando’s bodyguards cracked the pervert’s head in two? What was the worst that could happen? If Mejías double-crossed them in the end, they could simply tie him up with dinner napkins and throw him to the sharks.

  Gradually, the playwright wound down. His cheek twitched and his breath whiffled out wordlessly, like a mourning dove’s wing. Down below in the courtyard, the tyrant’s twin grandsons were coaxing their cat to walk on its hind legs. They’d taught Angola other tricks—offering its paw, sitting, rolling over. Delia liked to joke that Angola had been a Doberman pinscher in a previous life. “And you were a fancy poodle,” El Comandante had teased his wife, to which she contested: “¿Y tú, mi amor? Definitely a sheepdog. Ay, you never stop bossing everyone around!” A crash of dishes erupted from the kitchen. Gusts of frying meat wafted through the open window.

  Fernando opened his mouth to speak, but El Comandante cut him off with a papal gesture. “I’ve heard enough. You may proceed. But watch yourself, Mejías, or you’ll be sleeping with the fishes.” Then he turned to Fernando: “Let’s hope you’re not warming a serpent on your breast. Facilis descensus Averno.”

  Rural Virginia

  Goyo hadn’t forgotten how to shoot a gun—his skills were too ingrained for that—but he’d forgotten the visceral pleasure of pulling a trigger. As he aimed at the target, he imagined the tyrant at the business end of his barrel. This made it easy to shoot “him” in the heart fourteen times in a row. Over the years, Goyo had sharpened his skills with regular visits to shooting ranges in the suburbs. Once he’d taken Luisa to his regular range in Fort Lee—he’d wanted her to learn the basics in case something happened to him—but she’d left trembling and unable to fire a shot. Goyo knew he was capable of killing. If he ever came face-to-face with El Comandante, there’d be no discussion, no second thoughts, no mercy. He’d shoot the bastard dead.

  A soft rain fell as Goyo drove through the Virginia countryside. He liked the distorting effects of the rain on his windshield, how everything appeared moist and magnified, like his best memories. The rains here were nothing like the torrential autumn storms in Cuba, where the water sluiced through the streets like rivers. The tropics were defined by excess: too much light, too much rain, too many mosquitoes and caudillos, avalanches of grief. A convoy of refrigerated dairy trucks roared past him, most likely headed to New York. When he’d been a part of the city’s hurly-burly, he’d taken its wonders for granted. Miami was a village by comparison.

  Goyo pulled off the interstate to a drive-through place and bought himself a chocolate-dipped ice cream cone. It would have to tide him over until he got to Arlington. He wanted to arrive before dark, after
which it would become difficult for him to read the road signs. He’d programmed his GPS to take him to one of the better business hotels in the area. His days of staying on flimsy, spine-torturing mattresses were over. Lo barato sale caro. What’s cheap ends up expensive. His father had taught him that. Papá had also taught him to seize pleasure when it presented itself. Because the real juice in life was fleeting, he’d said, hallucinatory, essential for dispelling the long stretches of mundane.

  A slate-gray storm obscured the sky. Lightning cleft the horizon. Goyo flipped through the radio stations again, stopping at a Metropolitan Opera recording of Faust. He pictured the twisted face of Mephistopheles booming: “Here comes eternal remorse and eternal anguish in everlasting night!” For a time in the seventies, Goyo had secretly taken singing lessons. It turned out that he had a decent baritone—alas, the most common voice—but he didn’t pursue it further. Another passion discarded in the name of security. He turned up the volume on the opera. If Mephistopheles were to appear before him now, would he do as Faust did and take the Devil’s deal?

  A clock chimed inside the hotel’s oak-paneled lobby. The sounds of a fox-trot drifted in from the lounge, where the bartender, burly as a gorilla, refilled the equidistant bowls of nuts. Goyo settled on a leather banquette near the bar and ordered a crème de menthe on the rocks. Around him a bunch of ruddy road warriors, fat from expense accounts, drank or played billiards, the balls clacking sharply on the baize-covered table. Above the liquor bottles, a flat-screen television murmured the news. The Middle East was in a shambles. Another ethnic uprising was convulsing Rwanda. A tornado had torn through Kansas, just like in that movie Goyito and Alina had loved as children. Carajo, he’d forgotten it was El Comandante’s birthday. Footage showed celebrations all over the island—no doubt with people they’d forced to the events with threats of reprisals. This was ruining what was left of his day. Goyo swallowed a third of his drink. Not even his sister-in-law’s prayer circle of Miami accountants could hasten the tyrant’s demise. Every santero and babalawo in Miami also had been called upon to use their sorcery against him, but nothing had worked. The hijo de puta had become immortal.