“And it’s crazy,” he said, “because everybody with skills wants to leave here. The doctors, they give their five years’ service, then they start applying to leave. And nothing gets done here, because all the best people have left to get work.”
Then, shouting over the music, he told a marvelous story of a Spanish woman who married a Cuban taxi driver. The taxista was yet another frustrated Cuban professional, with a degree in psychology. The lady from Spain adored his deep intellect; their love began as a passionate meeting of bodies and minds. They married, but when it came time to leave, the bureaucratic paper trail revealed that before marrying the Spaniard, the cubano had already been married twice—and divorced only once.
“Well,” Tomas explained, “here you can get married to one on Monday and get around to divorcing the other on Wednesday.” The bigamy issue was resolved, but the newly divorced cubana wife was the mother of the man’s only child, a daughter. The taxi man persuaded his forgiving Spanish bride that they should take his daughter with them to Spain. This required the mother’s consent, so a deal was worked out, with the Spanish bride sponsoring a visit by the mother—who reclaimed her husband and daughter the moment she arrived in Spain. In no time at all, the Cubans were remarried and living as a family in Madrid, leaving the sweet Spaniard all alone and much the wiser.
Tomas wanted to find a way to bring Irina to Germany. Until he could figure out how to do that, he’d visit as often as he could and stay as long as possible. He called often, and they talked for hours. (He called Chickie, too, doing all the talking, knowing by the fact that his impetuous friend stays on the line that his calls were welcome.) And if he couldn’t get Irina out of here, no matter what, he said, he’d find a way to get her teeth fixed. “She gets the basic care, but there’s no money for the pure look of things. And she is so beautiful. Isn’t she beautiful? She deserves, I think she deserves to have her smile.”
The last set was over. I said my good-byes to Tomas, Irina, and Chickie, and to Las Perlas del Son. I give Rosita the bass bits, for her use and to share among los contrabajistos de Santiago de Cuba. She introduced me to the rest of the band: percussionist Maria Salas, singers Oleisis Infante Guerra, Albis Garrido, and Ailen Guevara, guitarist Maritza Cutiño, and la trecera, Yilian Zalazar. It was my last night, and though it was late, I couldn’t help lingering as Tomas and his friends departed and the players packed. Out in the street, I took pictures of Las Perlas in their spangled dresses, carrying the great half-broken bass by its head and tailpiece like stretcher bearers bringing the wounded to safety.
Next morning, I started out for Vermont by way of the Moncada Barracks.
While the air was still cool, I walked my book-stuffed roller bag and my crammed computer backpack from the heart of the old city to Lilia’s house. She wouldn’t hear of my hiring a taxi to the airport, so she’d asked a friend to drive me; I’d accepted, mostly for the chance to see her one more time.
The Lucero family, heroes and children of heroes, were there to wish me well, and I was grateful for and much humbled by their kindness. Lilia fed me tostones again, and one more tiny cup of her sweet coffee. We prayed together.
I made presents of the last school supplies and toiletries in my stash, good razors and scents and soaps. These tokens were nothing compared to their gift, a tableau chiseled from a huge coconut: three wild spotted doves in the crown of a palm. I tied it onto my pack but it weighed next to nothing, a burden of kindness that lightened my heart and our parting.
I flew from Santiago to Havana, then had to figure out how to get from José Martí International Airport’s domestic terminal to the international terminal, kilometers away. Taxi drivers wanted outrageous sums to make the connection, so I decided to wait for the advertised interterminal bus.
Everyone warned me that tourists don’t use the shuttle, and when the six o’clock shuttle hadn’t shown by six thirty, I began to understand why. The few folks waiting with me were airport day-shift workers, now heading home, and a security detail from the army facility next door—I didn’t look closely—heading back to barracks. They all looked at me as if I were a little nuts or, worse, disgracefully cheap. But I was tired of propaganda and harassment and fee-wracking, and I wanted this bit of Cuban infrastructure to function. Besides, if the flight were delayed, I might need my last three pesos convertibles for food.
The sky rushed toward dusk. No bus. Birds set up a sleepy-time call-and-response. Trees blazed up red and yellow in the sideways light. The airport road was lined with royal palms, potent and ceremental. I began to think of last things, as in, “These’ll be the last palms I’ll see for a while.” One last pathetic Cuban dog dragged by, so small and saggy it looked almost marsupial in the uncertain light.
At last, at about six forty-five, the bus stand attracted a crowd of workers in the know, regulars who said the drivers never run the six-o’clock shuttle; that’s when they break for dinner.
When the seven-o’clock shuttle showed, it was the fabled Havana guagua I’d been told to avoid. It was long and vast and nowhere near big enough for all of us. We crowded on anyway, and it was tight enough to make a traveler think about his wallet’s location and the vulnerability of his backpack’s pockets, but no more crowded than the rush-hour trolleys of my Boston youth. It was just that there was less money in every pocket on board, more travail on almost every face, less soap and more stink to nearly everybody, including me.
It was dark by then. The driver was in a bad mood. The guagua threatened minivans and pedicabs and came awfully close to two motos flying without headlights. We passed a terminal dedicated to flights to the United States. It looked lonely.
Terminal three, for most other international flights, is modern, bright, and relaxed. I’d somehow arrived with time to spare: time to confirm that my flight to Jamaica would leave on schedule, time to pay my exit tax, to call Yolanda and thank her and the Havana Luceros once more, time to smoke a last Montecristo and to shop for CDs. Roberta, the music booth’s clerk, shared my delight in finding a copy of Celina Gonzalez’s ¡Qué Viva Chango! And no wonder: Roberta wore a necklace of red-and-white beads. She put Celina on her boom box and we danced in the booth; Roberta pantomimed shaking and dusting and anointing, the rituals of cleansing and blessing. And then it was time to go.
* * *
At the final inspection of passport and bags, I had to take off my belt, shoes, even my watch. Hurrying to put them back on, I dropped the watch. The crystal popped off and the second hand stopped. I assumed it was broken, but I pressed the stem and it started ticking again. Everything felt like an omen.
Whatever that one meant, it ushered me onto an almost-empty plane that touched down in Kingston close to midnight.
Planning this trip, months earlier, I’d noticed the awkward gap between my arrival and my early-morning flight: not enough time to justify the bother and expense of taxiing into town for a bed. New York’s Air Jamaica phone reps assured me that, of course, I could wait in the terminal. No problem.
Problem. Busy as Norman Manley International Airport seemed on that long-ago weekend morning of the chorus’s arrival, it was not busy enough to stay open all night. My flight arrived as a final chore for a sleepy, resentful skeleton crew. Everyone wanted us to go away so they could go home. My fellow passengers rushed through the customs shed and grabbed taxis while I was still asking Air Jamaica reps where I could sit, as promised, through the terminal’s graveyard shift. They avoided me. Cornered, they said that I couldn’t stay, that the entire airport closes until dawn. They took no responsibility for their colleague’s disinformation. Yes, all the taxis were gone, and no, they wouldn’t help me summon a cab or find a hotel room. They wouldn’t even tell me their names, and the one wearing an ID badge took it off when I got out my notebook. Lights were switching off all around us. No, I could not stay there in the customs shed, with the night watchman. They would call security if I didn’t leave right now.
So, at about one A.M., I stood in t
he dark on the pickup/drop-off apron. The blackout wasn’t perfect. There was a light on in the customs shed at my back, perhaps for the night watchman to read by. I was clearly visible to the many young men lingering just beyond this glow. What were they doing there, miles from town, hours after Norman Manley called it a day? I looked for faces offering help or hope, but everyone stood just far enough from the light to stay anonymous. I could see eyes, but they avoided mine, snapping straight to my luggage. The light around me—or, rather, the distance it maintained—felt like a polite lie, a pretense we’d be honoring for just another minute or two until someone made up his mind.
I made mine up first. Counting on a few seconds’ grace, I strode right into the darkness, quick-walking down the apron to the only lighted door in sight.
Corporal Lawrence and Constables Cole and Elliott have my undying gratitude for their willingness to unlock the door of the Jamaican Constabulary Force’s airport substation. They made me comfortable on a bench with my bags stacked by my head, the Luceros’ three doves serene atop the pile. Air Jamaica abandons people “all the time,” they said, making me feel just a little less stupid. And the airport after midnight, they assured me, “is no place to be.”
Come the morning, however, I was in just the right place in the boarding-pass line to meet Jason, a Jamaican-born, New Jersey-raised U.S. Army soldier. He was tall and handsome, smart and endowed with that humble forthrightness many good kids learn from their encounters with the double-edged karma of soldiering. Having just finished a tour of duty in Iraq, Jason had been visiting relatives in Kingston. Now he was on his way to see his parents. We’d be sitting together.
I was tempted to ask if he’d been to the region of Iraq where my stepson Brendan was guarding an air base. But there was all the settling in to accomplish, and the air crew’s safety lecture to attend, and the takeoff to breathe through …
Once we were in the air, I realized I was no longer living Cuban-style: no longer scheming to make a little do a lot, worrying about pickpockets or wrong-day tickets or buses that don’t show. I was on my way home to the land where most things work, and I could finally relax … if it weren’t for worrying about the OFAC license extension that never arrived.
In a few hours I’d walk up to a JFK passport control booth and confess that I’d been trading with the enemy.
Unless I chose to lie.
So it had come down to that again. Lying my way into Cuba, lying my way back out: flying in as a missionary, flying home as—what?—a traitor? Only traitors trade with the enemy. When my country’s policy proceeds from the lie that Cuba is a threat to us, and not the other way around, nothing that follows can be entirely honest, straight, and true. Should I say that I’ve spent three weeks on a beach in Jamaica? Maybe I could claim to have received an extension but lost the fax. Or should I just tell the truth and shame the devil?
I went around and around for a while, but there were only so many possibilities. Coming in under the Reverend Esau’s missionary wing was awkward enough; I doubted I could pull off a serious, solo lie. So I’d confess, which meant I’d be busted or fined. It looked the same no matter how many times I turned it over, so I was grateful for the distraction when the crew served snacks and drinks, and Jason and I resumed our interrupted conversation.
He had five years in. His specialty, he said, was communications, but they needed heavy weapons, his cross-specialization, so he’d just finished a tour as a machine gunner on supply convoys. In those latter months of 2005, convoys were getting hit every day.
When I couldn’t resist asking about the war, I tried to make my curiosity a gambit he could refuse. “I suppose everybody asks how you think the war is going.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s just war. Just war. You go there, you fight, you come back and try to forget about it.”
“Just war,” I echoed.
“Yeah.” For a while, he stayed on-message. Things were getting better over there, we were winning, we were accomplishing our mission. Morale was good. Everybody was proud of what they were doing.
Then Jason told me that the Iraqi people are beautiful. I replied that people everywhere are beautiful. We agreed that a lack of necessities makes some people act ugly and that there’s a great lack of necessities out there. Not so much where we were headed, but where we’d been.
They brought us lunch, and Jason kept talking. He told me his friends at home didn’t always recognize the guy he’d become. “I’m a lot more cautious now.” He paused, looking at nothing for a moment. “I’m a lot more cautious.”
“Well,” I offered, “kids think they’re immortal. Kids don’t believe in consequences. I imagine you’ve seen enough to know you’re not immortal.”
“That’s it,” he said. “Lots of young people, ours and theirs …”
He was reenlisting. “I think I’ve got one more deployment in me.” He’d probably be heading to Afghanistan, but who could tell? “They keep your life on hold, just so you know.”
Just so you know who’s in charge. Not so much a policy as a signal, like el bloqueo, the embargo.
Jason’s father is a Vietnam vet. From what his father had told him, Jason thought the Army had been doing a better job taking care of veterans than in his dad’s time, but it was hard to say.
I asked whether his fellow soldiers feel appreciated by civilian America, and he said they do, but without offering any examples. I asked whether they knew what they were fighting for.
“I mean, not many of my friends really ask. Nobody really knows why we’re there … I’ve been there,” he said, “and I don’t know.”
I thought of the letters and battle reports of Vara del Rey and his comrades of Spain’s army in Cuba, who wrote, “We have no hope of victory, because we don’t know what victory means.”
When Jason said he didn’t know why he’d been where he’d been, why his comrades have killed and been killed, there was no self-pity in his face. He wasn’t asking for absolution, or to be excused the duty he’d sworn to give.
He was just telling the truth.
I told him I was sorry, and I told him I was honored by his service.
Then we changed the subject.
When the plane landed, we let a lot of older folks get off ahead of us, then walked side by side down the long white corridors to passport control. We wished each other luck, and I told him I hope to vote for him for president someday. He laughed—and then admitted he’d thought about running for something, sometime.
We turned right into an enormous hall, absolutely empty except for a score of manned passport booths. Jason shook my hand and headed for a booth. My chosen officer scowled as she saw me coming, but why bother picking another? With no more customers coming, any officer would have all the time in the world to discover my violation of OFAC regulations, my ersatz evangelical mission, my economic treachery.
Then, just a few steps before I reached her, I heard the roaring.
It came from the doors behind her, the doors on the far side of all these control booths. Roaring, cheering, laughing: there was some kind of happy mob out there.
As I handed over my passport, I realized how pressured she felt. “What’s going on?”
“Families,” she said, rolling her eyes. “There’s two planes right behind you.”
While she scanned my passport, a new howling sounded from the corridors I’d just quit. Some new mob, coming this way.
“Two full charters of new sponsees, one from Mexico, one from India, same time, adjacent gates … Jesus! And everybody’s waiting for them out there.” She jerked her head at the noise behind her. “Where’ve you been?”
“Cuba,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Get out of here.”
The screaming started as soon as I pushed against the door but stopped as soon as the couple of hundred people on the other side could see me. Then they went back to shouting and laughing and top-volume talking in ecstatic Bengali and Spanish. When I saw Kathy in the crowd, h
er mouth was open, but I couldn’t find her voice in all that clamorous love. I couldn’t even hear myself shouting her name, so it was as if there were no noise at all, no crowd, as if we were alone and she was all I could see.
We weren’t alone in the big shared taxi that carried us out to the suburbs, where we’ll find family and our car and the beginning of the ride home to Vermont, so we started telling stories. The kids, work, the house. Santiago, Havana, Guantánamo. Actually, I wasn’t ready to tell all those stories yet, so I talked more about the last couple of days, about saying good-bye to Lilia, and my Jamaican Constabulary sleepover. I tried to describe Jason, how much he was like Brendan, how much they reminded me of colonial soldiers a hundred years lost and gone.
And suddenly I remembered David, one more young man caught up in those old, old lies. I told Kathy about his swim, his imprisonment, his life now, his sorrow. I told her about the interview’s last question. He was done, exhausted, but when I’d asked for one more answer, he’d sighed and nodded.
“The fact that el Báse was there, this American place you could escape to, does that seem to you now like a wonderful thing, or a bad thing that had a good side?”
David had just told me about the most frightening and humiliating experiences of his life. Now he drew himself up to answer me, not striking a pose but just standing tall in the little room haunted by loss; a man standing over a dead child’s bed, softly stating what he knows, what he has earned the right to say is true.
“To me, el Báse is a piece of territory stolen many years ago. Morally, it doesn’t belong to them. The Americans keep it as a way to violate our country’s rights, to violate human rights. If you ask me whether or not I think you should be there, I would say, ‘Go.’”
After that interview, I remember, I felt homesick, ready to go. But I had another week’s work to do, had yet to get myself to Gitmo. I picked up the books scattered across the worn sheets; the cover of my junk-shop copy of José Vargas Vila’s Ante Los Barbaros—an image of an arrogant U.S. sailor, rifle on shoulder, looming over a helpless city—almost came off in my hand.
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