by Carlos Eire
“Why is this woman here all the time? Why does she have to beg for money?”
“Because she doesn’t have any money,” said Marie Antoinette.
“Why not?”
“Because she is poor and crippled.”
“And why is her son like that? What’s wrong with him?”
“Some people are born like that.”
“Why?”
Both of my parents spoke at the same time. “Because they led a very bad life in their prior incarnation,” King Louis replied. “Because God has a special role for them to play in this world. It’s His will,” said Marie Antoinette.
I didn’t like either answer. And I didn’t like to see that woman and that boy at the end of a long, boring ritual.
Fortunately, the woman wasn’t there on the night of our Saint Anne’s procession. And come to think of it, she vanished completely around that same time. Suddenly, one Sunday, she wasn’t there anymore. I rejoiced, of course, and put her out of my mind. I thought that my mind was better suited for other things. Finer things.
As I walked in that procession up the street and back, I wasn’t thinking about the legless beggar, or her boy, or Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary and grandmother of Jesus. I wasn’t thinking about Jesus, or even the candle I held. I was thinking of that new television show, Bat Masterson, and the way Gene Barry wielded his gold-handled walking stick.
Whack! There goes the bad guy’s gun, flying out of his vile hand. Justice served, the weak and helpless protected from thugs, once again, in the American Wild West. I pretended that my candle was a walking stick just like Bat Masterson’s. Not at all like my mother’s cane, no. That was just a cane, and its only purpose was to help my mother walk. Bat Masterson didn’t need a cane. He was a hero, and way too cool. No cape, just a walking stick.
Elsewhere in Havana there were different celebrations, some honoring the seventh anniversary of Fidel’s uprising against Batista, others marking the uniqueness of the passage of time in more personal ways. The new wig. The new baby. The wedding feast. The funeral. The new job. The new hubcaps for the Ford. The big favor granted by Saint Barbara. That first kiss. The visit from Grandma. The return of Grandma to her home in Santiago, after a two-month visit. That one hundred and thirty-fifth visit to the brothel. That lucky number for the bolita—the numbers racket, where every cipher had a name—the mariposa, the jicotea, the mala mujer, the novia China. The number, your number, your luck, your party. You name it. I’m sure there were at least a hundred thousand ways in which that night was special in a city of nearly one million people.
Good Catholics that we were, our party was a candlelight procession in honor of Jesus of Nazareth’s grandmother. And we marked the occasion, and marked our territory, sanctified it by turning into fireflies.
Fireflies must seem so frivolous to ants and bees. What do they accomplish, glowing in the dark as they do, on summer nights? Where is their devotion to the community as a whole, their team spirit, their selfless dedication to the greater good?
Yet there we were, glowing, mating, reproducing, just like fireflies. And praying, too, unlike insects. Such pointless, criminal behavior. Praying for things to remain as they had always been, praying, in thanksgiving, for the privileges we enjoyed, and asking for more on top of that. Thanking God, beseeching Him through His human grandmother to smile upon us, to save us from lizards, and foul-mouthed empresses, and drooling boys, and bullies. Praying for love and health and a stay from executions. Praying fervently and absentmindedly, praying with Bat Masterson in mind.
The big man, Fidel, had big plans to turn us all into ants and bees. That night would be the last time we were allowed to be fireflies out on Fifth Avenue in Miramar, or anywhere in Cuba. No more public processions. No need for opium in a permanent Revolution. Who needs religion when you’ve got Agrarian Reform?
I didn’t know what Agrarian Reform was, exactly. All I knew was that some landowners were being forced to give up some of their property, and I had to draw posters proclaiming the wonders of this. Yes, even the good Christian Brothers got into the act for a while, before Fidel kicked their cheek-turning butts out of the country. We all had to draw posters praising Agrarian Reform in fourth grade, in a Catholic school run by the Christian Brothers.
La Salle del Vedado.
No, I didn’t make a mistake. In September 1959 our parents sent us to a different school, one that wasn’t so obviously tainted with the aroma of Batista. This La Salle was run by the same order of monks, but it was in an older suburb and it was attended mostly by middle-class boys. And some other transfers from Miramar, like us, who were pretending not to be part of the elite.
The elite, you see, had a habit of getting into trouble by the end of1959.
Take Louis XVI, for example. King Louis drove a big, black 1956 Buick Special, with three nifty streamlined, chrome-plated holes along both sides of the hood and spectacular chrome fenders, front and rear. It was a beautiful car, with budding tail fins and a panoramic windshield, as Louis liked to call it: a single windshield, rather than the divided, two-panel windshields that cars used to have before the era of tail fins. It was a great car, but it wasn’t exactly a luxury item, like a Cadillac. In fact, it was three years old and was missing one of its hubcaps. But that car, which wasn’t even worth a second look to an American dentist or accountant, earned my father a lot of trouble.
Any time he drove that car outside of Miramar or El Vedado, he ran the risk of being pelted with stones. Once, while stopped at a red light in a poor neighborhood, a group of angry men and women began to rock the car back and forth, shouting insults at him. This made him so nervous that he traded it for a two-tone, vanilla-white-and-sky-blue 1951 Plymouth without a panoramic windshield. It had a cool hood ornament, which must have been a streamlined version of the Mayflower, but it didn’t have those three holes on either side of the hood. And it had a lot less room inside, especially on the floor of the backseat, where I liked to hide when we drove up Aunt Carmela’s driveway.
Our school also made him so nervous that he transferred us to La Salle del Vedado.
And what an awful school that was. My fourth-grade teacher actually made me long for profesor Taxidermista and profesor Infierno. This teacher, who was tall and lanky, and had a nose like an eagle’s beak, made it clear he didn’t like any of us. He had rules for everything and graded very harshly and unfairly. God was in the details for him, entirely. Miss one tiny detail and your grade would plummet. Use the wrong kind of ink and your assignment wouldn’t be accepted at all. Look out the window for a second and you’d receive extra homework, graded extra harshly.
But it wasn’t the teacher who bothered me the most. It was my classmates. I had no friends at all, just enemies, the only genuine ones I’ve ever had. They wished me harm every day of school and did all they could to make me miserable.
Maybe it was the chauffeur-driven Cadillac that started the trouble. You see, Gerardito Aulet had also transferred, but his father wouldn’t go as far as mine when it came to changing his automotive skin. We rode Gerardito’s Cadillac in the morning, and it picked us up in the afternoon. Cadillacs were still fairly safe as long as they stayed in Miramar and Vedado. At noontime we would ride the school bus home and back for lunch.
The other boys always gave us such funny looks when we pulled up in the Cadillac.
Anyway, these kids tormented me in the classroom and the schoolyard, and excluded me from any games they played. The guy who sat behind me during the first four months or so was the worst. Unrelenting, this pit bull of a bully. A hundred times worse than the worst bully I had ever encountered.
Asking King Louis to have a talk with the teacher was probably the worst mistake I made that year. He came to class with me one day and stood at the teacher’s desk, talking to him for about ten minutes. After they were done talking and my dad left, the teacher asked the guy behind me to switch desks with another kid a couple of rows away.
From that da
y forward, things worsened. All that I had accomplished was to confirm my status as a weenie. And the insults were now directed not only at me but at my fat, bald, and very old weenie of a father.
No wonder there are only four days I remember clearly from fourth grade.
Day one was my first day in that strange classroom, in that old building, surrounded by boys I’d never seen before, listening to the teacher tell us what kind of notebook we had to get, which color and brand of ink (only Pelikan), and which kind of pen we had to use (only Esterbrook), how we had to write our capital letters, and so on. A thousand and one rules, each of which would be strictly enforced. I missed my view of the sea and the clouds so much.
Day two was the fateful day my father showed up and failed to make things better for me.
Day three was the day when we were forced to draw posters for the Agrarian Reform. I wanted to draw a picture of a vinyl record with a big scratch on it, stuck on the refrain, “Reforma Agraria, Agraria, Agraria, Agraria, Agraria…” I was so tired of hearing about this Agrarian Reform. No one could watch television or listen to the radio without hearing about it. Sometimes we’d hear about it from Fidel himself, because every time he gave one of his six-hour speeches, it would be the only program carried on all the airwaves. When he spoke, all had to listen. Or turn off their radios and televisions. (The loudspeakers on street corners would show up about a year later and take care of the silence in some people’s homes.) So, to me, this Reform deal was just one huge broken record. But vinyl records had too many lines, and my perfectionist tendencies stood in the way of drawing a record that didn’t have the right number of lines.
I sold out, and I still hate myself for it. I’ll never forgive myself.
I knew that our teacher liked Fidel, and that he was all in favor of the Agrarian Reform, whatever it was. I knew the teacher liked things his way, and his way alone. I knew that he had given us this assignment so he could send our posters to some other place outside our school where some special big deal would be made of schoolchildren’s drawings in praise of the Agrarian Reform.
The catch for me was that I had already started to sour on Fidel. What I had come to loathe the most was the unrelenting barrage of information on the Revolution and its programs. It was like nothing else I had ever experienced, this saturation bombing of the mind. Even the worst of all things I despised—lessons on hell—lasted only a half hour now and then. Nothing had ever been rammed into my skull as persistently as the Agrarian Reform and all other things related to the Revolution. Even Mass lasted for only one hour once a week, tops.
I also didn’t like the way Fidel hogged the airwaves. Something didn’t seem right about it. And his speeches were incredibly boring, and rambling, and too full of promises and threats.
Anyway, I knew exactly what our teacher was looking for in these posters, and I gave it to him. I gave up on drawing a broken record, and instead turned my circle and its few lines into an archery target. And I drew three arrows, each with all their tail feathers drawn in painstaking detail, sticking right into the bull’s eye on the target. Below the target I wrote, in the capital letters our teacher insisted upon, THE AGRARIAN REFORM HITS THE TARGET.
Dante was so wrong. At the lowest point, at the nadir of the ninth circle of hell, Satan will be sharing eternally cold space with treasonous brown-nosers who abandon their principles and do what is wrong for the sake of a good grade, or applause. And these brownnosers will have to lick Satan’s razor-studded butt forever and ever, with their tongues.
My infernal poster was awarded first prize by the teacher and sent on to some exhibition. And the worst part of all of this was that I didn’t know whether to hate myself or be proud of my accomplishment.
To go back to counting the four days I remember from fourth grade: day four was the day of the big explosion. There we were, going through the routine of another day in class, some afternoon in early 1960, when suddenly: BOOOOOOOOOM! The whole room shook. The window shutters rattled. The chalk on the little shelf under the blackboard jumped up. I especially remember feeling the force of the explosion entering through the soles of my feet and traveling through my body in what seemed to be an eternity, but was probably a mere fraction of a second.
If I hadn’t heard the unmistakable sound of an explosion, I would have guessed it to be an earthquake. But you couldn’t fool me when it came to explosions. And this was the biggest blast I’d ever heard or felt. I had no idea the big ones could be so nice. Yes, this was a great one! The best ever.
We all looked at one another and at the teacher in utter amazement. It sounded so close and far away at the same time. All of us knew instinctively that an explosion that big had to cause a lot of damage. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one wondering what had been blown to pieces, and where.
About an hour after the explosion, we learned what had happened. Our teacher stepped out of the room for a few minutes, probably for the third time since the blast, and came back with the news: a ship full of weapons and explosives had been blown up in Havana’s harbor. Same spot, almost, as the Maine, in 1898.
So this is what it had been like. All my life, I’d been hearing my aunt Lucía tell me about the Maine blowing up, and how she remembered the explosion, even though she had only been three years old at the time. I had always thought she was making up her memories of the sinking of the Maine, but now I understood. You don’t ever forget an explosion like that.
And our school was miles from the harbor. I tried to imagine what it had been like closer up. It must have been incredible!
For the next few days after the blast, there was nothing but news about the ship, its crew, its cargo, and the likely suspects. It had been a ship loaded with armaments for the Revolution. Guns, ammunition, ordnance, military equipment of all sorts, purchased with contributions made by people in other countries who wanted to help the Revolution. An international show of support blown to pieces. A big ship, loaded with stuff that was made to explode. Stuff taken from Fidel and his glorious Revolution.
Not everyone was in favor of the Revolution, you see. And this was the biggest sign these counter-Revolutionaries had been able to send Fidel. It was also a huge strategic victory. That ship sank to the bottom of the harbor in pieces, along with its precious cargo.
What I didn’t know at the time was that two of my relatives were involved with the people who blew up that ship. One was my cousin Fernando. The other was Fernando’s cousin—his mother’s nephew—who was no blood relation of mine, but still part of the family.
How I wish I had known.
Fernando’s cousin was the son of a former cabinet minister, who had served other presidents, including Batista. Miguelito was a very nice guy, I hear. And he was also a serious bomber. My other cousin, Rafael, would tell me years later how Miguel would show up at his house in El Vedado, just one block from my fourth-grade classroom, at odd hours of the night, and ask for a drink. Then he’d sit in a comfortable chair, with his drink, looking at his watch.
“Twenty more seconds, and you’ll hear a big one.”
There was a BOOOOOM! somewhere off in the distance.
“Forty seconds, and you’ll hear another.”
BOOOOM!……BOOOOM! again, off in the distance.
“Muy bien! Wait another twenty minutes. They’ll sound closer.”
Some conversation would follow, usually not about the bombs, but about those things that interested guys in their twenties in Havana back then. I can’t fill in those details, sorry. I wasn’t lucky enough to be in my twenties in Havana before the world changed. But my cousin Rafael tells me it was unbelievably wonderful.
Wonderful enough to plant bombs and blow up ships in Havana Harbor, just so it could stay that way.
BOOOOM!… BOOOOM!… BOOOOM! Twenty minutes later, definitely closer.
“Good. They worked. Now wait another ten minutes for the finale.”
BOOOOOOOOOOM! Very close this time. Hard to tell, exactly, but close.
“Great! Wonderful! Such beautiful drumming. Perfect. That will show the bastards! Sons of whores! Cabrones, hijos de puta! Is it all right if I stay here until morning?”
Miguelito got caught one day. Most of them did, sooner or later. These fine boys who had once played with firecrackers and marbles and ridden their bikes around the block. These fine patriots, who drank Cuba Libres while waiting for their bombs to go off in the night, almost all of them ended up getting caught.
Fidel proved smarter than all of them. He won. And most of the world doesn’t know or care how fiercely he was opposed. He’s been there for so long now, he seems as permanent and inevitable as Mount Everest or the earth’s two poles.
But, for about three years, he was not inevitable.
Fernando almost killed him. Almost. He came so painfully close, so awfully close. I’ll tell you about that later. They didn’t know about that when he was arrested and tried, and they never found out. If they’d known, he would have suffered the same fate as Miguelito.
Miguelito got the ultimate sentence, as did every bomber. Paredón! Paredón! Paredón! No suspense here; I’ve already told you about him. He’s the guy who grabbed his crotch as he was about to get shot and said to his executioners: “Here, shoot this first, you queers!” I’m so glad he didn’t shout “Long Live Free Cuba,” or anything like that. Some messages are more beautiful when encoded in profanity, especially in the face of something as obscene as a firing squad that’s working for a ruthless dictator masquerading as a humanitarian.
At the same time that he was sweeping the beggars off the streets, Fidel was silencing all opponents with an iron fist.