The Guardia Rural, riding their Kentucky-bred horses, in their McClellan saddles with their machetes out, would aid new owners to take possession of the land. A land empty of guajiros could not cause problems down the line. “Burn, do not leave a house unburned, do not leave a bohío standing, burn, burn, burn. A bohío left standing will bring squatters. Squatters will plant crops, and then you have to wait for them to harvest their crop. No squatters, no crops, no bohíos.” The Guardia Rural escorted the old owners and tenants out of their homes to the Central Highway. They left behind their mango trees, with their red and yellow fruits; orange trees, sweet and bitter ones, those whose fruit was used to make mojo; lime trees, with small green fruits; and the grapefruit trees. Turning their backs to their lost bateyes, they headed toward the city on foot to try to create a new life. Always thinking of his business, Don Miguel befriended the Guardia Rural, especially the captain of the garrison: A case of liquor, a box of the best cigars, and a wad of money in a paper sack contributed to peace and understanding. The guardia represented authority, peace, and stability on an island where stability was as unknown as the future price of sugar in the London market, or the landing place of the next hurricane, or the results of a numbers game. Now the guardia never came unless it was invited, and Don Miguel never invited them. He owned the land.
Don Miguel and Mike reached a five-strand wire fence that enclosed a pasture with short natural grasses growing out of red dirt. At the top of a low hill sat a bohío, its wooden planks painted white, now faded. Tied to a post, an old mule slumped under a much-abused McClellan saddle, stirrups attached to its tree with ropes. Mike opened the pasture gate, and his father honked as he lit his second cigar. Slowly the door of the bohío opened. An elderly black man appeared, wearing baggy khaki trousers, mended and mended again, and a blue work shirt washed so many times it was almost white. Recognizing the jeep, Alfred walked as fast as his deformed feet would allow. He held his frayed hat in his hands as a sign of respect, and greeted them.
“Don Miguel, Mike, welcome. Mike, it’s so good to see you again. You’ve been gone a long, long time. If your father allows me, I shall bring to the batey a young lamb, so you may have good meat.”
Alfred’s English was perfect, clipped, all sentences finished with a pause.
“Alfred, how are you doing?” Mike asked. “How is your girlfriend?”
Alfred laughed while he patted the old mule’s rump. “She is fine.” He turned his attention to Don Miguel. “How are you doing, sir? Do you feel any better?”
Don Miguel got out of the jeep and shook Alfred’s proffered hand.
“How is everything? Do you still have problems with stray dogs?”
“No, the strays have left your sheep alone. None were recently killed. I placed poison last month, there, near the forest. I think it killed a bitch that was going to have puppies. I have not seen her anymore. I do not think the batey dogs are coming up here. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Mitzi or the black dogs. I’m sorry, Don Miguel, would you like some coffee?”
There was only one possible answer. If he did not accept, he would have hurt Alfred’s pride.
Alfred brought out clean, thick porcelain cups with double bottoms. The amount of coffee in them couldn’t fill a thimble, but the coffee was strong and freshly brewed. They sat in the small living room. The floor was gray cement and spotless. A hen ventured in, but Alfred shooed it away. They drank coffee and Don Miguel asked questions about sheep, weather, fences, and corrals. After ten minutes, he got up, thanked Alfred, and headed to the jeep. He had wasted enough time. Mike remained, talking with Alfred, until he heard honking from the jeep.
“Good-bye, Alfred, thanks for the coffee. I’ll see you at the batey.”
Alfred followed Mike to the car. “Good-bye, Don Miguel. Good-bye, Mike,” Alfred said, as he shut the passenger door behind Mike. “It was so nice to see you.”
As Don Miguel drove the jeep away, Mike turned and waved back.
— 4 —
Ricardo and the Bulldozer
SWEAT POURED DOWN his chest under Ricardo’s thick cotton work shirt. He had tied a red handkerchief over his nose and mouth; dark aviator glasses protected his eyes from the dust. He sat on the old bulldozer, surplus equipment from World War II, when the Americanos had built Air Force bases on the island. A base near his home was supposed to be secret, but there were no secrets on an island. As a child, he dreamt of driving of one of those gigantic machines they used to build the runways on the base.
Ricardo’s father had once worked for Angelin, Don Miguel’s uncle. Angelin had a small farm near Havana. He had grown up in a period when certain gentlemen thought that gentlemen did not have to work. They dressed to go to the office, drank coffee, read the newspapers, walked on the streets to look at the pretty girls, went to lunch, took a siesta, dressed again with a new shirt, went to the club to play cards or dominoes, returned home, and dressed in different attire for dinner. Angelin dressed well. He was tall and loved life. No, he devoured life. If he had been born in France, he would have been a boulevardier or a flâneur. He showed off a magnetic smile. He knew how to court a lady and be chivalrous. Sometimes he had money, other times he did not. If he had it, he gave his mistress orchids; if he did not, he wrote her poems. He married early in life, and he loved his wife and everyone else’s.
One night at the opera—when Havana had formal-dress opera nights—he was with his mistress in the box reserved for the mayor of Havana, a cohort in his escapades. The mistress sat in the front seat. She had that rare combination in the tropics of red hair and fair, almost milky, skin. Angelin, resplendent in his tails, stood behind her. The box was full of unusual orchids, grown in Angelin’s hothouse. The only problem was that a close friend of Angelin’s wife recognized them, and the next morning promptly called her. When Angelin returned from his fictitious long visit to his farm, his wife confronted him.
“You were at the opera!”
Angelin replied smoothly, “You know I don’t like opera.”
Years later, his wife told a friend she never learned for sure if Angelin had been at the opera with a woman that night.
As a child, Ricardo helped his father with those small chores that country children do. One day, while picking pineapples in a field, a pointed stalk struck his left eye, piercing the cornea. Ricardo lost his vision in that eye. The children at school called him Tuerto—one-eyed—and made fun of him and picked fights just to hit him on his blind side, but Ricardo grew stronger. One day, in a fight which he had not started, he knocked another child out cold. They never bothered him again.
Angelin admired Ricardo’s spunk. He started to use him for small errands around the farm. Ricardo got tired of school, but not before he had learned how to read, write, multiply, divide, and figure percentages. When Ricardo was old enough to drive, Angelin made him his driver, and when he partied, Ricardo took him there. When he got drunk, Ricardo carried him home. In the 1930s, Angelin lost his farm to a bank, though not his craving for life.
While Ricardo was acting the playboy—El Habanero, the boy-man who drove a car and acted sophisticated—Cuca was the girl next door. When she was just sixteen, a small, well-proportioned young woman, she wrote in her little diary: “I like Ricardo.” One day, Ricardo parked Angelin’s Buick in front of his house to clean and wax it. On its polished hood he saw a reflection: the face of a beautiful woman. He smiled and the face smiled back at him. Their courtship lasted two years. Ricardo wanted to be alone with Cuca, but her mother, aware of Angelin’s and Ricardo’s fame as womanizers, chaperoned them on every date. Ricardo had thought Cuca was going to be an easy conquest: a country girl, just a teenager. He took her on trips to Havana, to Varadero, and to see the sponges in Batabanó. Cuca’s mother accompanied them in the car, at the movies, always next to her daughter. After two years, Ricardo gave Cuca an ultimatum: “Tonight we are going to be alone. I am tired of paying for your mother. I am tired of stealing kisses. I am tired of sitt
ing on the porch of your house, hearing the rocking chairs squeak. I want you.”
Cuca smiled, but she trusted her mother’s advice: “Of the forest, not a twig.” “Ricardo, Ricardito,” she said, “I love you. You have to respect me. What happens to me if you don’t come back? If you get tired of me? I lose everything. I’m a virgin and will be a virgin the day we marry. No, I won’t do it. You will not respect me if I do. You may think that I am like other girls, but I’m not. I don’t fool around.”
Ricardo talked to Cuca’s father that night, but before she would accept Ricardo’s proposal, Cuca set one condition: “You can’t work for Angelin.”
Ricardo then found work as a chauffeur for Don Miguel. Cuca was happy about that, since the new boss was a serious and stable man. Cuca and Ricardo married and moved to Don Miguel’s farm in the center of the island and far away from their families. Whereas Angelin, an excellent equestrian trained in France, had taught Ricardo how to ride, Don Miguel taught him how to break horses. When Ricardo did not drive, he broke the bigger ones.
Ricardo liked to use a bozal, and after the horse’s nose was soft and tender, he changed to a snaffle bit. Don Miguel did not allow Ricardo to break his best show horses. He left those for Manuel, but Ricardo trained the four-year-old farm horses, which made excellent riding horses. They were gentle, never spooked, but had fire and stamina. He broke four horses at a time. He saddled up early in the morning. The first day, Ricardo took a saddle blanket and placed it in front of the horse’s nostrils, so the horse could smell and feel it with his whiskers. Then he played with the blanket, and waved it in front and back of the horse. Some horses spooked and bolted. Ricardo would talk softly to them, as if telling them a bedtime story. When the horse accepted the sight and smell of the blanket, it was placed carefully on its back, and Ricardo slowly moved, using the same tone of voice and the same cadence. The horse’s muscles quivered, he was frightened, and he knew he could not free himself from the bozal. Ricardo then held the saddle in his right hand, while his left hand held the bozal. He lifted the saddle and let it fall gently on the horse’s back. Ricardo took the horse to the middle of the corral and tied him with a slipknot to the center post. If the horse fought the tether, the bozal cut into his nose and put pressure on the top of his head. Ricardo stayed next to the horse, and using a smooth voice, calmed it down, and then released him with a rope tied to his halter. Holding the rope, Ricardo made the horse move in circles, always forward, forward, and forward. Some bucked, others crow-hopped, and others were more rebellious and tried to get rid of the saddle by throwing themselves against the sides of the corral. He did this for several days until the horse accepted the weight of the saddle. When he thought a horse was ready to ride, Ricardo moved him against the side of the corral, placed his foot into the stirrup, and grabbed the horse’s mane. In a single fluid motion, he mounted the saddle, and then coaxed the animal forward with pressure from his legs. After a few hours of riding in the corral, he rested. Then, after a few days, he took the horse to an open pasture and rode it for hours. After returning, the horse would be tired, but not defeated. Then Ricardo took the horse for a long easy walk to cool off, removed the saddle, and hosed it down with cold water to remove sweat and dirt. The next day, he would feel the horse’s back to see if it was sore. At the end of a horse’s fourth month of training, Ricardo would use him to rope calves in the corrals, and at the end of six months, to rope bulls in the pastures.
He soon took on an additional duty. In the late forties, the land at the rear of the farm was not good enough to grow sugarcane or corn. It had native grasses, and in the dry season, its pale yellow color resembled wheat fields. Yet the weeds and brush affected the growth of the native grasses, and the land had to be improved.
Don Miguel knew that the International Harvester dealer in the city of Camagüey had acquired some US Army surplus bulldozers, and after some serious haggling with the dealer, Don Miguel purchased one. When it arrived, Ricardo felt as if he were the most important man on the farm. He sat in the driver’s seat and started the engine. The San Joaquin group was there: Nandito, Martinito, and Mando the curandero. They gasped at the big red bulldozer, and touched it all over. They took in the smell of the diesel fumes, heard the sounds of the machine’s engine, and marveled at the size of its blade as it moved up and down with a touch of a lever. Ricardo put the machine in reverse and slowly lowered it to the ground from the flatbed trailer. Two years later, he was an efficient bulldozer operator. He was the only one at the farm who could drive it.
BY NOON, HE had cleared part of a tract in the savanna, and was eating the sandwich Cuca had packed for him. That’s when he noticed the jeep with Don Miguel and Mike. Ricardo did not like El Viejo to show up and check on his work. Ricardo was proud of his work and did not mind the long hours, but he also liked his fighting cocks, which he kept hidden in the forest at the edge of the savanna.
Don Miguel hated cockfights. He did not care about the cruelty of one animal killing another one for sport. He believed that if people gambled, and thought they could make a lot of money with their gambling, they would care less about how badly they lived, and accept their poverty, believing that gambling was their key for a better life, and never work to improve their lot.
Every Sunday, Ricardo went to a nearby valla to fight his roosters. It was a small one with a roof of zinc, sides of salvaged wood, and round grandstand seating made of rickety boards. The fights started at one o’clock, and they lasted until the last pair of roosters had fought. The crowd, a mixture of Haitians, Jamaicans, mulattos, and whites, typified the island’s population.
Each rooster had his own handler who cared for it from infancy and trained it to fight. Referees checked the roosters’ spurs—some were natural and others were made of steel and attached—and then the feathers, to be sure that no foreign substance had been used on them. Two cocks were set face to face and then released. The fight always began with a crescendo of shouting and betting: “Five to the Colorado, ten to the Jerezano,” until one of the roosters quit the fight. In some cases, it ended because a rooster had received, in a flurry of flying, a fatal cut in his neck. The crowd tossed back more beer and rum, and another fight would begin.
Ricardo’s father had brought hens from the south of Spain. He bred them with roosters from Mexico, and the result was a group of heavy and fast-fighting birds. Ricardo fought the roosters and kept them in square wooden cages. On his day off, he went early to the forest and selected the ones to fight at the valla that afternoon.
For his part, Mike enjoyed going to the cockfights. He loved the speed and color, the animation of the people, their shouts in patois, and the ardent way they gambled their scarce pesos. Mike also enjoyed having a beer or two.
Don Miguel stopped the jeep to listen to the sounds: the swish of the trees falling, the crescendo of the motor when the blade had to push, the noise of the big blade scraping the earth to remove roots. Ricardo jumped from the cabin and approached them as he cleaned the specks of dirt from his face.
“Good afternoon, Don Miguel. I’m glad that you feel better and decided to see how much I’ve cleared. Are you showing Mike how much the farm has changed?”
Ricardo knew El Viejo always liked company: someone to open gates, to listen to his ideas, to allow him to vent his anger about the government, about the stupid way politicians controlled the prices of cattle on the hoof, and the way they still allowed the stockyards to be controlled by a few. The topics seldom changed. Don Miguel had the same discussions with Paulino, the minister of agriculture, his friends at the Club Hipico, and the president, if given the opportunity. Now it was different. El Viejo still had passion, but he preferred to stay at the batey, walk around the house in a robe, pull weeds, smoke his cigar, and look at the show string animals. Even though Ricardo knew it was time for someone else to take charge, he loved the old bastard.
“Yes, it’s time for my son to see what we’re doing here. He has to learn firsthand, Ricardo. How i
s everything working? Did you grease the bulldozer this morning, and check the oil?”
“Of course, Don Miguel, you know I always check it. You taught me well.”
No detail eluded Don Miguel, at least not until recent months. Don Miguel was lumbering back to the jeep when he suddenly pointed to a small tree about fifty yards away and instructed Ricardo, “You have to eliminate that little tree over there. It isn’t big enough to provide shade.” El Viejo climbed back into the jeep, where he sat slumped and breathless, exhausted by the oppressive heat. Before turning the ignition, he said to Ricardo, “ I want to talk to you tonight.”
Don Miguel turned to Mike, “Let’s go, Son. We have other chores to do.”
My Lost Cuba Page 4