Yankee Come Home

by William Craig

  “At gunpoint, they asked us what we were running from. We just stood still,” David said. “It was by the grace of God that we did not run. Later on, while in jail, I remember seeing the clothes of a man who had decided to run. We definitely made the right choice.”

  It was hunger that got the boys caught, but not their own hunger. The Border Guards hadn’t been looking for them, or on patrol. Like everyone else in Cuba, the guardsmen were just trying to get around the broken system, their impossibly inadequate rations.

  “It was by chance that they caught us,” David said. “They were just out hunting. There are many wild animals out there.”

  The naval base is a nature preserve inadvertently created by U.S.-Cuban tension. Much no-man’s-land on either side of the wire has reverted to prime habitat for jutia, maja boa constrictors, the Cuban rock iguana, and other species nearly exterminated since the beginning of the hungry Special Period. The ironies are infinite: Holding on to Gitmo, the United States congratulates itself for protecting Cuban wildlife from cubanos starving under both the U.S. embargo and the ineptitude of a Communist regime that never could have seized power if not for the chronic kleptocratic ineptitude of all the U.S.-backed regimes before it, stretching back to the seizure of Guantánamo.

  David sighed again. “When they caught me, I was treated well. We told them that we were lost, but they didn’t believe us. Regardless, the first thing they did was feed us breakfast. Then they put us in an empty cistern. I lied, telling them that my friend was asthmatic and could not be contained in an enclosed place. So they blindfolded us and kept us outside until the others came to get us.”

  The “others” were militia troops, often charged with suppressing opposition to the regime. The guardsmen had been kind, but the militia began “to use some psychology on us. They locked us up in a cell one and a half meters wide by three meters deep. There was a toilet, two beds, and three of us prisoners. There were no windows, so no sun came into the cell. I was there for seven days before anyone interrogated me.”

  Was David’s friend still with him?

  “No, he was in a different cell. We weren’t allowed to communicate with any other cells. We spent about forty days in that cell. I was not verbally abused by the guards. Among the prisoners, we rarely said anything to each other but a simple ‘hello.’ There just was not much trust between us.

  “I saw the sun once during those forty days. The problem was, I did not have my ID card, so I would wait a long time for them to figure out who I was and what to do with me. Whenever the guards passed by I asked them to call my mother so that, first, she would not worry, but also to see if she could bring me my ID. For the first three weeks, they never called. Three days before I was transferred, they finally called her. My mother came to see me, but she was very upset because I had never told her of my plan.”

  With his identity established, David and his friend were moved to a prison in Guantánamo City to await trial. In this larger jail, there were perhaps 125 prisoners. There was a a maximum security section, but David and his friend were always in the general population. Among his fellow prisoners, he met “four or five of us who were there for the same reason. Of other kinds, I knew two or three who were in for armed robbery, and two who were accused of rape. They were later proved innocent, because the girl admitted that the sex was consensual. Her parents were the ones who believed it was a rape. Both of those guys were held there for two years after I left. There were other crimes as well.”

  In this prison, at least he could see the sun. “At noon, they would gather us all in the yard. We would sit around and enjoy the sun, smoke, talk, and exercise. We were allowed to go outside two hours every day.”

  I asked whether the relatively light security made this prison a more pleasant or a more dangerous place.

  “Everywhere was dangerous.” David rubbed his hands on the chairback, as if he were mopping his palms. “Every day you would hear about some incident or another, someone getting hurt. The prisoners stole plastic knives from the cafeteria and sharpened them. Everyone had them, everyone was armed. We even had sticks at times. There were sticks in the patio that we used for exercising, and occasionally we would steal the sticks for protection and hide them under our mattresses.

  “I still hadn’t had my trial, so I didn’t want to get on anyone’s bad side. I got along with most of the prisoners, but there was one guy who I fought with a lot. He was disliked by many of the prisoners, so he became an outcast in the prison.”

  There were other dangers. The prison was primitive, the water and latrines wretched. “I contracted hepatitis. I was in desperate need of a doctor, but every time I told the guards they thought that I was on a hunger strike because—due to my illness—I had stopped eating.

  “My friend warned me to stop pleading, because those on hunger strike were locked in a separate room and beaten by the guards. But I couldn’t eat. My hepatitis would not allow me. On top of that, the food was always rotten or moldy. I just couldn’t get it down.

  “There was one prisoner who was in charge of getting everyone where they needed to be. He was the head honcho, the guy who had been there the longest,” David said. “He spoke up for me. He told the guards that unless I was treated immediately, I would die. The guards listened to him: I was taken to the infirmary and given some medicine. But then I was put back in my cell. After a couple of days, I wasn’t any better, so they transported me to the hospital in Guantánamo, which has a prisoners’ ward.”

  Over several days’ treatment, David got through the disease’s acute phase, though he was still far from well. (Even today, his pale complexion is touched by a hint of jaundice.) He’d been in prison just a little more than two months, and he wondered how he would survive a sentence of several years. That was the going rate for captured balseros. David was demoralized, sick, and scared.

  Then came the twist: “When I finally got to trial, they told me that it was no longer against the law to leave the country.”

  The United States and Cuba had struck a deal.

  The coming spring’s fair weather threatened to escalate the balsero invasion. Unwilling to accommodate another Mariel boatlift’s worth of freedom-seekers, America needed a stronger deterrent than sending Cubans picked up at sea to Guantánamo or a third-nation safe haven. Cuba wanted a deterrent to discourage flight, but it also wanted a safety valve for discontent and a destination for that small portion of the discontented who would go regardless of dangers and rules.

  On May 2, 1995, the Clinton administration announced that it would empty the refugee camp at Guantánamo by accepting most internees as legal immigrants. From then on, the camp would stay empty, because the United States was abandoning its pledge to help all refugees from Cuban communism. Cuba and the United States had agreed on a new “wet foot” policy: The U.S. Coast Guard would deliver all Cubans intercepted on the ocean right back to Cuba. Not to a hopeful limbo in el Báse: directly to ports in Cuba.

  To sweeten this betrayal, the United States pledged to monitor the returnees’ fates, checking to ensure that they were not victims of Cuban government reprisals. (In 2004, the State Department admitted that it had no way of following through on any investigations outside Havana.) And the United States reaffirmed its commitment to accept a minimum of twenty thousand Cuban applicants for legal permanent residence every year. (Most of these get their chance as a result of a visa lottery. A total of 541,000 Cubans applied in 1998 alone. As of this writing, Cubans who qualified in that year were still waiting their turn to immigrate.)

  The new, harsher “wet foot” policy all but scuttled the balseros. (Today, only those with the most money or the boldest schemes for landing “dry foot” on U.S. soil make the crossing. The urge for going has been suppressed or sublimated into the visa lottery.) Within weeks of the U.S. announcement, Cuba reversed its law. Now that it was almost impossible to emigrate, the government magnanimously made leaving legal.

  “That change came on May 27, 1995,”
David told me. “They caught me in March and changed the law in May. I asked them, ‘What’s going to happen to me now?’ They told me not to worry, I would only get four years in jail, and my friend would get six.”

  But the government, happy with its bargain, extended a kind of retroactive clemency to David and other too-early, would-be emigrants.

  “In the end, I got three years of probation. I could go out, but not to public places. It was like being in jail at home. I had to sign a lot of papers with the police department, which basically stated that if I screwed up once more, I’d go to jail. My friend had to stay in prison for three years, because he had deserted the military. Is there anything else you would like to ask me about this?”

  David had been sitting for a while, since he’d described being sick in prison. Now he was clearly done, rising, and beginning to pace again.

  “Looking back,” I asked, “was your attempt to reach el Báse a good idea that didn’t work out, or a bad idea?”

  That interested him, and he came to rest behind his chair. “It was a bad idea to not have prepared myself better. It was a bad idea to do it the way I did it. One can train for difficult tasks, and I’d had some of that in the military. We ran every day, sometimes with full packs. I was flexible, I exercised. I just wasn’t psychologically prepared for what I was facing. I thought it would be easier. But even without being prepared, I was able to make it to less than a kilometer and a half from the base.”

  I told David that I admired him for taking great chances, for valuing his freedom so highly, and for surviving his experience. “I don’t think I could do what you did,” I said, “and I’m sorry you had to go through that. Thank you for telling me about it.”

  “No problem,” he said, almost roquero cool again.

  Chapter 11

  EL HOMBRE LLEGA—THE MAN IS HERE

  Yolanda Fed me right up to the very last minute, a lunch of platanitos and arroz con frijoles negros, a plate of tuna con cebolla, un poquito de mayonaisa, and a salad of tomates y aceitunas. Then we parted with hugs and kisses all around.

  Carlos, Yoli’s dad, was waiting to drive me to the train station in his company-provided commuter car. It was tiny, some kind of Trabi clone. I insisted on not taking the front passenger seat from its occupant, an old woman with chin hair who never looked my way or said a word. The seat behind her was taken by a woman I took to be her daughter, so I squeezed in behind Carlos, who is a very big man. He needed his seat all the way back just to clear the steering wheel. Among the big meal, the bags on my lap, and Carlos’s seat back, I was squeezed short of breath all the way into Havana. But I didn’t have to worry about making conversation. The woman to my right was an ecstatic Pentecostal; flashes of Jesus madness strobed in her eyes. All the way into the city, we listened to her booming, hiss-blurred cassettes of música cristiana:

  Cristo es poder,

  Cristo es poder,

  Cristo sabe las luchas …

  Christ is power,

  Christ is power,

  Christ knows the struggles …

  Carlos let me out at La Coubre Station, where I began a long wait in a stationary ticket line, trying not to resent the heat, my aching arches, and, most of all, the clerks and managers doing air-conditioned nothing behind their ticket windows.

  The train for Santiago de Cuba would leave from Havana’s Estación Central de Ferrocarriles, the city’s enormous main station, several long blocks away. I’d gone there yesterday afternoon, taking a cab to make sure I’d arrive during business hours.

  The Estación Central is a rare example of the Venetian Revival. Its 1910 design, commissioned from a leading Yankee architect, combines Romanesque, Byzantine, Gothic, and Spanish-spun Italian Renaissance styles; the multiply arched and multiply filigreed mix is as over the top as the Capitolio, the Palacio Presidencial, and Havana’s other slices of neocolonial wedding cake. The station has a small plaza out front, where I met a gaggle of clerks taking an extended cigarette break. Butts littered the pavers at their feet, and a couple of guys lit up again while informing me that I couldn’t buy a ticket for my train from the Estación Central at the Estación Central.

  “¿Porque no? Don’t you sell tickets in this station?”

  “¡Claro!” they answered with evident pride, nodding toward the great station’s handsome façade. “But not that kind of ticket.” With no further clarification of this profound bureaucratic mystery, they let me know that my ticket had to be purchased at La Coubre Station, and pointed down the road.

  The street fronting the Estación Central is the Avenida de Bélgica, the “Avenue of Belgium,” but a name so formal could never catch on with Cubans. Everyone calls it by its ancient name, Egido, which translates into New Englandese as “the common.” The street follows the line of Havana’s old seven-gated wall.

  The clerks pointed me toward the harbor, where Egido meets the seaside road, Avenida del Puerto, at the point where the latter takes on the name Avenida San Pedro. But Cuban civic slang insists on preserving past associations and neighborhood identities, so this stretch of San Pedro is also known as Desamparados, “the helpless ones” or “the abandoned,” because in pre-Revolutionary days this warren of single-story homes facing Havana’s wharves and warehouses was packed with cheap, “Hey sailor!” brothels. It didn’t seem such a good sign to be heading for helplessness, and sure enough, I’d hardly traveled a block in late-afternoon foot traffic before the sky opened like a water balloon popped by la Giraldilla’s upraised cross. One moment we pedestrians were hot and dry; the next we were deep-sea divers, struggling leadfoot and ungoggled over a crumbling sidewalk on the ocean floor.

  When I finally washed up in front of a ticket window at La Coubre Station, I learned how helpless I really was. A moonfaced young woman wearing a neckerchief that made her look like a José Martí Young Pioneer playing make-believe bureaucrat told me that I could indeed make a reservation for the Santiago train—but I couldn’t purchase the actual ticket in advance. I had no choice but to reserve a seat—first-class, remembering the Luceros’ warnings—and return the next day, when someone would at last take my money and give me the slip.

  So I’d dutifully returned to La Coubre, to this immobile ticket line. Questioning my neighbors, I discovered that, for reasons neither the smoking clerks nor the moon-faced lady mentioned yesterday, tickets for this Santiago “special” train couldn’t be sold until four P.M. Everyone says there’ll be fewer tickets than customers.

  I tried for Zen waiting mode, an absence of need or ambition. Cubans go to that no-place effortlessly, flicking an internal switch toggled every time they get in line for bread, for vegetables, for rice, for cooking oil, coffee, or a few ounces of flyspecked meat. Dozens of folks were already waiting on other lines when I arrived, at about one P.M. Some probably would wait in vain, only to learn that the schedule had changed or the train had broken down. Outside of the luxury hotels, nothing much in Cuba works easily, dependably, or well. Much of this dysfunction is due to shortages and breakdowns, to inefficient systems and worn-out equipment. Still, coping with these problems would be a lot easier if institutional Cuba didn’t treat information like a rationed commodity.

  At home and in the streets, Cuban talk is an open faucet, a constant stream of hustle and camaraderie, humor and rumor. At government offices and state-run shops, information leaks drip by grudging drip. Sometimes it seems that no one in Cuba ever tells you everything you need to know about how to get anything done. Consequently, it’s possible to waste grueling hours just trying to find a piece of meat, buy a stamp, send an e-mail. Go to the obvious source and you may very well find that this place doesn’t have e-mail access but the other one, the one in the next neighborhood, might. Trek to the other one and you find that it does have an Internet hookup, but you’ll have to purchase a time card for it at yet another place. That place is closed, but someone on the street knows a place like it some distance away, so you take a chance on another long walk in the climbi
ng sun, on getting there before the joint closes. You’re in luck—this last place is open! But it no longer handles the old cards, and the new cards—they’re everywhere, didn’t you know?—probably won’t be recognized by the one computer you’ve found with a working Internet connection. If the new cards would work, surely the people back there would have told you about them.

  Or not. Why weren’t you told about the new regulation that turned a simple errand into a three-day process? Was it simply because you didn’t know enough to ask another question? Is it possible the clerk didn’t know about the new rule? Did she think about telling you, but just not bother? Or did she decide it’d do you no harm to be Cuban for a few frustrating hours?

  At last, a clerk—the very same moon-faced young woman who took my reservation yesterday, this time wearing a matronly blouse and a thin cardigan sweater; must be mighty cool on the other side of that glass!—beckoned the first “special” customer forward, and before too long I was saying a cheery hello and laying out my pesos convertibles for that first-class ticket … only to hear her ask, “A first-class reservation?”

  Oh, she remembered me, but she claimed there was no reservation in my name. “Did you really make one?” She poked dubiously at her keyboard, then gave up. “It may have been accidentally erased,” she confessed, offering a Silly me! smile. “It’s too late now; only second-class seats are available.”

  There are fights you fight and fights you should never allow to happen. The gentlest of rejoinders—¡Qué lastima! “What a shame! Are you quite sure?”—brought a supervisor over to stand behind her chair and frown at me in a way that suggested the customer is hardly ever right. I humbly surrendered, which made them both smile. By the time money changed hands, the clerk was calling me mi amor, working a very Cuban talent for making the diddled admire the diddler’s audacity.

  Then I got back out on Egido, second-class ticket in pocket, pulling my roller suitcase over the smashed-up sidewalk, and wondering how far I could push what seemed to be my minimal luck. It was after four, and the especial—special, the Luceros assured me, because it is luxurious and never, ever late—leaves the Estación Central at six fifteen. The incompetent cutie at La Coubre had just informed me that my ticket must be “confirmed” by an Estación Central clerk before I can board the train. I had every reason to hurry—but these were my last two hours in Havana. I decided to see as much as I could see.