King of Cuba

by Cristina Garcia

  A man in white robes walked into the bar looking like Lawrence of Arabia. Goyo must’ve stared at him a moment too long because the fellow sat down next to him and ordered a Corona with a twist of lime. The stranger removed his turban, and his curly, reddish hair sprang to life.

  “You didn’t think I was really an Arab, did you?” he drawled.

  “Are you in theater?” Goyo ventured.

  “Working on a PhD in sociology.” He took a swig of his beer. “Where are you from, man?”

  Goyo pointed to the TV screen, now showing a frenzied conga line weaving its way through the streets of Cienfuegos in anticipation of the tyrant’s arrival. “A cursed place, a place where treachery is the common currency.”

  “You a poet?” Lawrence tossed a handful of cashews into his mouth.

  “Oh, nothing so useful as that.” His back pain was flaring up, and his mending leg throbbed. “Are you going to ask me what you should do with your life?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “One learns more from being old than from being the Devil.” Goyo sighed. “What would you rather be doing?”

  “Playing the trombone.”

  “The trombone?” In every concert band he’d ever played in, Goyo had disliked the trombonists most.

  “It’s a very underrated instrument.”

  Goyo shrugged. “Then take off those ridiculous sheets and become a trombonist, young man. Now could you please help me up here?”

  Switch and Bait

  Look at me: eighty-three years old and still peddling straw hats on the streets. My wife makes them with the sewing machine I’ve kept working for her since 1952. Did I tell you that I’m on the waiting list for new dentures? The ones I have are too big for me and hurt my gums. Mira, the teeth are so huge, especially the incisors, that everyone—even my own great-grandchildren—calls me Dracula. Don’t think this doesn’t hurt my feelings. I am, above all, a sensitive man.

  I cut sugarcane for many years, but today the fields are in ruins and we import food that nobody can afford. How can you live on a jar of olives? Even good olives from Spain. Everything, down to the bread on our tables, comes from abroad. That’s why I’m out here under the hot sun selling hats for a peso. Sometimes I change my price and tell a tourist the hats cost two pesos, not one. That’s two pesos convertible (CUC), or forty-eight pesos national money. Today, some fat cow from Miami fought me over the switch and bait, so I let her have the damn hat for one.

  —Faustino Diliz, street vendor

  * * *

  1. The crabs are running this time of year. We catch them at night when they cross the Ancón Peninsula, from the ocean to the bay and back. Our crabs are as big as a man’s fist and very tender. The paladares charge tourists fifty times what they pay us. A few years ago, a giant cangrejo punctured the tire of a Swedish woman’s car and sent it skittering into the sea. They say la sueca drowned, that her body was never found. Sometimes I fantasize that the crabs will rise up and fight back—an army of them, claws waving, refusing even us.

  —Gumersindo Pérez, crab catcher

  12.

  Monkeys

  Havana

  The day was sweltering as the tyrant climbed onto the steps of the Capitol building, the heat a thick ache inside his skull. He was working up the gladiatorial energy to address a crowd only a third the size Fernando had promised him. Most of those present had been bused in from the provinces, tempted more by the opportunity to visit Havana than to listen to another one of El Comandante’s long-winded speeches. All of them had already seen him on multiple occasions. Cuba was small, and the tyrant had visited every corner of it, shaken everyone’s hands twice over, kissed each new generation of babies, bored one and all to tears with his trademark tirades.

  A comparsa tried to pump up the excitement with its drums and Chinese cornets. A sea of birthday signs bobbed before him: ¡FELIZ CUMPLEAÑOS! ¡QUE VIVA EL JEFE! ¡CIEN AÑOS DE REVOLUCIÓN! El Comandante braced himself against the podium. Numbness crept through one foot, and he stamped it to prevent it from falling asleep. “¡Buenos días, ciudadanos!” he croaked. (Last month, a British newspaper had described his voice as “tobacco tinged with dirty, moonlit gravel.”) “Thank you for coming to celebrate my birthday today. But more important than my statesman’s age,” he said, pausing for effect, “is the fact that we, as a people, as a dedicated revolution, are still alive and well.”

  Impromptu dancing broke out in the back of the crowd, where the ¡SALUDOS DE SANTIAGO! signs were thickest. A few supporters waved from balconies, or were perched in the park’s deciduous trees. The tyrant could always count on the party faithful from Oriente to rise to any occasion. Historically, anything important that had ever happened in Cuba—in politics, culture, or music—had begun in Oriente, himself included. They were his people and he knew how to handle them, knew how to handle all the islanders. No one else could do what he did.

  El Comandante waited, letting everyone have their fun, before leaning in to the microphones: “¡Que viva La Revolución!”

  “¡Que viva!” the crowd roared back.

  Near the front, a good-looking guajiro carried a girl on his shoulders. Years from now, she would remember the day she got to see the last great strongman of the Caribbean. The tyrant beckoned them to the stage, and security went nuts, walkie-talkies squawking. What the hell was El Caballo up to now? The crowd parted as the man pushed forward, a look of disbelief on his face. He took to the stage, the girl still on his shoulders, and shook El Líder’s hand.

  “Tell me your name.”

  “Jacomino Rey,” he said in such a deep, sonorous voice that it made the women swoon.1 “This is mi hija, Clotilde.”

  El Comandante loosened a microphone from a cluster on the podium and brought it to the girl’s lips. She was maybe five years old, missing a tooth, and her hair was neatly cornrowed. “How old are you, Clotilde?”

  “Cinco,” she lisped, and the crowd went wild.

  “Did you know that today is my birthday?”

  She buried her face in her father’s neck.

  “I have a special favor to ask you, Clotilde. I would like you to sing me ‘Happy Birthday.’ Could you do that for me?”

  The girl nodded and immediately began singing to him off-key. It was a perfect moment, like so many he’d savored during his decades in power; in sync with an adoring public on a glorious summer day. Ay, why deny it? Every once in a while his scalp itched for a crown. He waited for Clotilde to finish before shouting: “¡Patria o muerte, venceremos!”

  At the edge of the crowd—everything significant always happened along the edges—El Comandante spied a group of protesters waving posters with . . . what? Caged monkeys? ¿Qué carajo? Security forces quickly descended on the miscreants and dragged them off. A shot rang out from who knew where, and people screamed and went running in every direction. Jacomino hit the floor with his daughter as a posse of bodyguards pulled the dictator down the Capitol steps. Undeterred, the congueros kept playing like it was the last party on earth.

  “Why the caged monkeys?” the tyrant demanded.

  El Conejo, imperturbable as ever, settled next to him in the backseat of the Mercedes. “They’re protesting the use of psychotropic drugs against political prisoners.”

  For years, El Líder had sent Cuba’s best medical students to the former Soviet Union to learn the art of making antidissident drug cocktails. Few approaches had proved as effective, in the long run, as turning his opponents’ brains to mush. Also, by being sequestered in mental institutions, the dissidents slipped under human rights radars. The motto chiseled at the entrance to La Mariposa, the island’s most notorious asylum: “There is no greater misfortune than the loss of reason.”

  “Who shot off the gun?”

  “It was stolen from a militiaman in Sagua la Grande. I’ll have more information for you shortly.”

  The tyrant looked out the tinted window of the sedan. It sped by ceiba trees and decaying balconies, past la esqu
ina caliente, where men argued sports all day long (and needed licenses to do so), past the broken sidewalks and cobblestones of Old Havana. Last week, two depraved citizens shook their fists at his passing car. How long before they dared curse him to his face? Along the malecón, skinny boys in rags jumped off the seawall, trying to outdo one another scavenging for bottle caps and fishing hooks2 and rusty coins. What would their revolution look like ten years from now, or twenty?

  When his sons were little, Delia had procured for them a pet bonobo from Africa. The filthy, insolent creature had humped the furniture, stolen the despot’s cigars, even sat in his armchair, waving and chattering like a third-rate politician. This had delighted everyone but him. “Send it back to the fucking jungle!” he’d ordered his wife. Later, he found out that Delia had donated the sorry beast to a zoo in Montevideo, where it continued to entertain gawkers with its antics.

  “I want to see those posters.”

  El Conejo bent over his cell phone, gleaning more details about the disruption. Security forces had rounded up 276 people in fifteen minutes, most of them randomly. After their release, word would spread of the Revolution’s continuing and unsparing interrogation methods. Fear would send deeper taproots into el pueblo’s fragile psyches. Terror, El Comandante knew, was the best taskmaster, delegating the bulk of his regime’s dirty work.

  Back at his compound, the tyrant examined the placards retrieved at the rally. The most egregious displayed a grainy photograph of a chimpanzee dressed in military fatigues pasted above the headline ANTI-EVOLUTIONARY! Another showed a group of sullen-looking monkeys behind bars wearing metal caps bursting with unruly electrical wires. The caption: RESIST BRAINWASHING! The most insulting poster featured a grinning chimp in a jaunty beret, mocking the slogan BE MORE LIKE CHE! El Comandante felt the slow tolling of an impending migraine. He was disgusted by this latest evidence of unrest—and on his birthday, no less.

  Arlington, Virginia

  Goyo’s hotel room was perfectly anonymous, decorated in masculine shades of beige and brown. There was an excellent mattress, a faux-marble bathroom with high-quality amenities including a discreet three-pack of condoms. Perhaps he should live out his days in a full-service hotel like this; forget the upkeep, the condo fees, the persistently noisome neighbors. No point in leaving his money for his children to squander. There was a giant flat-screen television, but he couldn’t bear to watch any more footage of the despot’s birthday festivities. He ordered a steak from the overpriced room service menu, medium rare with a double portion of mashed potatoes and a slice of peach pie. Then he washed his face and dried it on one of the thick, spotlessly white towels.3 In the hotel directory, an ad for a psychic healer caught his eye: SEÑORA VÁSQUEZ. BILINGUAL. NO PROBLEM TOO BIG. On an impulse, he called the number.

  “Good evening, Señor Herrera.”

  “Are you Señora Vásquez?” Goyo asked, startled that she knew his name.

  “Yes. I’ll be right up after your dinner.” The dial tone blared.

  Goyo’s lower back burned from the long drive north. He dug into his suitcase for a couple of aspirin, then lowered himself onto the bed. Room service knocked and rolled in his meal. The steak was excellent—except for the sautéed mushrooms he hadn’t requested. Señora Vásquez appeared at the door as he was finishing the last bite of peach pie. She wore a bold-print shift and carried a knapsack, from which she extracted a candelabra and a rusty gridiron. Then she whipped out a pack of Tarot cards and began shuffling and dealing them like a casino pro.

  “You are suffering from severe myocarditis,” she pronounced. “This condition will determine—”

  “Perdóname, señora,” Goyo interrupted. “But won’t you ask me any questions?” He wanted to inquire about his son’s future and his collapsing building and, most crucially, the odds of him succeeding in killing the tyrant.

  “That won’t be necessary.” One globular eye stared at him; the other continued reading the cards. “You will circle back to the original wound.”

  Goyo ground his back molars. What was this raving nonsense going to cost him? He kicked himself for not negotiating a flat fee in advance.

  “Twenty dollars for the first ten minutes. Prorated thereafter,” she said. “What you must do cannot be accomplished with a watering can.”

  No shit, Goyo wanted to say, but he kept his mouth shut. He noticed the diamond cross nestled in her cleavage, her black hair lacquered into a chignon at her neck. Her fingers were lengthened by long, flawless nails. She looked like someone capable of cursing him with durable maledictions.

  “You must not hesitate.”

  “To do what?” Goyo broke in, exasperated.

  “To fulfill your incurable fate.” Señora Vásquez flipped and rearranged the cards. “It is certain because it is impossible. Look here,” she said, tapping an acrylic nail on a gloomy-looking knight. “Destiny has put a spear in your hand. The ranges of disloyalty are great.”

  Goyo squirmed. “I don’t understand.”

  “This is what I can offer you. You don’t have to pay me if you find this unhelpful.” A madly twittering parakeet appeared on her shoulder out of thin air. “Now, now, Renata, calm down,” the psychic crooned, stroking the tiny bird’s head.

  Goyo thought twice before reaching for his wallet but decided to play it safe and handed the gypsy two twenty-dollar bills: one for her time, the other as insurance.

  “Call me if you have any more concerns.” She pocketed the cash and left.

  It wasn’t just the forty dollars he’d stupidly wasted that gnawed at Goyo but the countless minute decisions that had led him to the end of his pointless life. Carajo, why hadn’t he met Adelina again at the Gran Teatro when she’d asked him to? Hadn’t her request been tantamount to an apology? His whole life might’ve changed course right then and there. He rooted around in his toiletries for Luisa’s expired sleeping pills and climbed into bed. After she’d died, Goyo had sorted through a mountain of her personal belongings: crocodile handbags, designer suits ranging from petite to obese and imbued with her perfume, unguents and eye serums, a thousand shiny tubes of lipstick. He was half-crazed by the time he had it all carted off to the American Cancer Society.

  As he dozed off in a medicated haze, his phone rang. It was Goyito, begging him to return to North Carolina to pick him up. Was there no peace for him even at this hour?

  “They’re trying to poison me! They put LSD in my rice!”

  Goyo was too exhausted to argue. He’d heard from the Rice House director earlier in the day that Goyito had been caught distributing buttermilk donuts to his fellow dieters. That wasn’t all. Evidently, his son was also selling amphetamines in the form of diuretics and running a jigsaw puzzle racket. When it came to self-destruction, Goyito was a one-man Category 5 hurricane.

  “Tomorrow, hijo. Tomorrow,” Goyo slurred, then fell asleep.

  In the last of several feverish dreams, Goyo attended a lavish ball at the Catedral de San Cristóbal, its archways hung with swags of valerian. The guests were dressed in nineteenth-century finery—bejeweled women in cerise gowns, men in top hats and tailcoats. Chandeliers flickered vertiginously as the clatter of a thousand Spanish fans filled the air. A bald man in a Venetian mask presided over the festivities on a carved peacock throne, holding a scepter with a slowly spinning globe on its tip. Goyo drew closer to the globe. It was a perfect replica of earth, complete with snowcapped mountains, swaths of dense jungles, the ruffled surf of miniature oceans.

  His mission grew clear. “I’ve come for the scepter.” Goyo’s voice squeaked like a choirboy’s.

  The Satan fixed him with a stare. He lifted the scepter, and the spinning globe stopped. Goyo looked around him. Giants with halberds guarded the exits. As he lunged for the globe, the floor gave way and he dropped for what seemed an eternity . . . Through a slit in the curtains, the moon streamed its radiance into his eyes. Shadows he couldn’t account for marred the walls; whisperings seeped up from the plush carpet. Was h
e between worlds—a foot in this one, another in death? He worked up the courage to speak, to dispel the nightmare: “I am Goyo Herrera,” he gasped. “And I am still alive.”

  Cacharro Chino

  The car was a Geesley or a Gasless or a Ghastly—who the hell knew?—and it was my rental from Havana to Trinidad. Every indicator on the dashboard was useless. The speedometer flew to 220 kilometers per hour with each tap of the brakes. Or hovered at zero. Or wandered, haphazardly, to other erroneous speeds. The fuel gauge stayed on full, so I had to guess when to put in more gas, which cost an outrageous five dollars a liter. According to the odometer, the total mileage for our ten-hour round trip was 13.5 kilometers. I’m not even going to talk about the potholes. Or dodging the cows, goats, horses and buggies, chickens, vultures, three species of crabs, aggressive hitchhikers, Russian tractors, or rope-toting cowboys. Ask Pilar and Linda. They were with me.

  —C.G., novelist

  Matanzas Province

  The helicopter noise was infernal. Even with his protective headgear, the chukka-chukka roar of the blades drowned out the tyrant’s every thought. As they coasted over the hushed decay of the Zapata Swamp, he spotted an alligator surface then dive beneath the mangroves. El Comandante used to take VIPs snorkeling along the magnificent coral reef nearby. The Russians had looked like sloppy lobsters with their flabby, sunburned guts. Today, the sky was glazed a porcelain blue. The weatherman4 had predicted rain, but that fool couldn’t separate thunder from his own farts. Regrettably, he was the last meteorologist in Havana. The rest had defected to Miami.