Death Comes in Through the Kitchen

by Teresa Dovalpage

  As for the Yuma, I assumed she was using him, as Haydecita had used that old Spaniard to get out of Cuba. It broke my heart, thinking that Yarmi could be left in the same position, alone in a strange country, though she assured me that she had no intention to leave.

  As soon as I saw him, I knew he was Mateo. Yarmi had told me he was a journalist and a nice guy, but kind of simpleminded and washed-out. That was exactly what she said, washed-out. “He doesn’t have the spunk that Cubans have,” she laughed. But still, she kept him. She always referred to him as her official boyfriend. Then she would say that Pato Macho was just a friend. But who are we kidding here? A friend who comes in at midnight and leaves at three in the morning?

  Oh, yes, the Yuma said that they were getting married. I didn’t believe him because Yarmi had never mentioned it. She didn’t tell me everything, but I thought this was important enough to share.

  But I didn’t have the heart to set him straight. Plus, I had just met him! And then we discovered the body. Ah, the poor guy seemed so out of place, so disoriented in the middle of the turmoil, with that white wedding dress folded over his arm.

  The apartment looked as usual. Nothing was out of place . . . at least I didn’t notice anything. Except the chicken, fo! There was a very rotten chicken on the kitchen counter, next to a bag of sugar full of ants and some eggs. As if she were getting ready to cook when—but then Yarmi was always cooking, or cleaning, or reading a book. Busy as a bee. Maybe she knew she wouldn’t have a lot of time in life to accomplish everything she wanted to do.

  Yarmi Cooks Cuban

  Coconut drops: A Jamaican treat

  Hola, mis amigos!

  Welcome back to Yarmi’s Kitchen. It smells so good today (like coconut, sugar and ginger) that I would like to invite you all to hang around here, enjoying a cup of coffee, while I finish a delicious treat: besitos de coco for my dear friend Fefita.

  In English they are called “coconut drops.” But you know how affectionate we are in Cuba, always kissing and hugging each other, so we call them besitos, little kisses. They are easy to make. And fun.

  You will need one big coconut or two small ones, diced and grated, and one teaspoon of ginger. The other ingredients are a chorrito of vanilla—according to my grandma, a chorrito could be anything from a teaspoon to half a cup, but in this case, it’s a tablespoon—one pound of brown sugar, three and a half cups of water, and a pinch of salt.

  This is a Jamaican dish, or perhaps our own version of it. Grandma Hilda used to make it for my grandfather, Abuelo Samuel, who was Jamaican. That accounts for my second last name, Richards, and my initial interest in the English language.

  Yes, I am a mutt: my folks came from the Canary Islands, Spain, and Jamaica, which makes me—Cubana one hundred percent!

  To prepare a batch of besitos, start by cracking open the coconut. Pataplúm! Grandma would grate it slowly, careful to collect the milk and save it for later. That’s a delicacy in itself! If added to rice, coconut milk gives it a creamy texture. Or you can mix it with mango juice to make mancoco, a refreshing drink.

  Next, bring the water to a boil and throw in the grated coconut. After ten minutes, add the sugar, boil for five more minutes and add everything else. Stir it from time to time so the sugar doesn’t stick to the pot. Keep boiling the mix for fifteen more minutes or until it becomes thick and sticky.

  With a wooden spoon, take small portions of the paste and place them on an oiled tray. If you want, sprinkle them with cinnamon. Let them cool for ten minutes. And enjoy.

  Grandpa Samuel seldom asked for anything, but one of his few requests was that his wife make besitos de coco every Sunday. They reminded him of his “other island.” He was born in a little town located on the Rio Minho.

  “The place was beautiful,” he would tell me. “It had green pastures, blue skies, a river where kids used to swim . . . It had everything, except for food and opportunities.”

  When he was a teenager, Grandpa Samuel traveled to Banes, Oriente, to be a machetero in a sugar cane factory owned by the United Fruit Company. A few years later he moved to the other end of the country, Pinar del Río, where he eventually married Grandma Hilda. They grew tobacco and coffee.

  Did you know that Pinar del Río produces almost eighty percent of our country’s tobacco crop?

  Grandpa Samuel passed away when I was ten years old, but I still remember all the stories he told me and the old songs he loved to sing, like one that said: “My brother did a-tell me that you go mango walk, you go mango walk.”

  I repeated the verses after him, even when I didn’t have any idea of what the words meant.

  I am getting nostalgic . . .

  Following Grandma’s advice, I have saved the coconut milk and I am going to prepare a glass of mancoco. If you want to try it, just mix in a blender, or by hand, a cup of mango juice and half a cup of coconut milk. Add ice cubes and start sipping. Salud!

  Comments

  Julia de Tejas said. . .

  You have such an interesting family history, Yarmi. You should research it! The mancoco mix sounds great. It reminds me of a Thai dessert: sweet sticky rice soaked in coconut milk and topped with mango slices.

  Yarmi said. . .

  Julia, what a great suggestion! I will make it next time I have coconut milk available. Yes, I would like to know more about my family, particularly my great-grandmother Fayna, the Guanche, and how she ended up in a remote village in Cuba.

  Cocinera Cubana said. . .

  I always marvel at how well you write in English. Did you learn it from your grandfather?

  Yarmi said. . .

  Hola Cocinera.

  I learned songs and isolated phrases from him, but he never taught me English, at least not in a formal way. Grandpa Samuel’s family was very poor. He didn’t have a chance to go to school and could hardly read or write in his native language. But his songs and many of his sayings stayed with me. I found out, after I started the Licenciatura, my BA studies, that I knew more English than I was aware of.

  Taos Tonya said. . .

  I wish I were your neighbor too.

  Maritza said. . .

  Is it true that coconuts are used in Santería to predict the future? Do people offer them to the orishos—not sure about the spelling—to get answers about their lives?

  Yarmi said. . .

  Tonya, you can come and visit anytime! Maritza, these deities are called orishas. Santería is actually a syncretism of the belief systems brought in by African slaves and the Catholic dogma that the Spaniards imposed upon them. The slaves combined the saints and their native gods and created sort of composites. Like most oppressed people, they would cling to religion for hope. But few people in Cuba practice Santería anymore. We don’t need that. So instead of “offering” a coconut to the orishas we put it to a better use: we eat it. Besitos to you all.

  Chapter Six

  The Dissidents

  Though comrade instructor hadn’t taken her concerns about the dissidents seriously, Marlene decided to pay them a visit. She knew it was a long shot, and had no proof to even consider them suspects, but still. It wouldn’t hurt, she thought. They were avowed gusanos, and that, in her opinion, meant that they were up to no good.

  Carmela Mendez and Pablo Urquiola had been married for over twenty years. They had shared a deep love for each other and for the revolution, at first, and then a total disillusion with the government. Their feelings for Castro had turned from the fervor of converts to the hatred of apostates. The couple’s most prized possessions were a small Centro Habana apartment and a big Cuban flag. The flag had been nailed to a wall next to a Traveling Christ, as people called the Sacred Heart prints. Devout Catholics had had to move them from the living room, where they were initially displayed, to a bedroom, the kitchen, or the darkness of a closet. This had happened during the sixties and the beginning of t
he seventies. After Pope John Paul II visited Cuba in 1998, the Traveling Christ made a comeback, reemerging shyly in the dining room first and finally reinstated to its original position. It had taken around forty years to make it full circle and the old images showed the wear and tear.

  Carmela and Pablo sat under the print and the flag. They were both in their fifties but looked older, with the lines that perfect conviction leaves on believers’ faces. Marlene Martínez, sitting across from them, glanced suspiciously at the Traveling Christ, whose fiery eyes glared back at her. They had not been happy to see a uniformed woman at their door. But after Martínez explained she was investigating Yarmila’s death, they had agreed to cooperate.

  “We liked Yarmi,” Pablo said. “We’ll help you. Whoever killed her should pay for it.”

  “I was thinking of her parents this morning,” Carmela added. “I can only imagine how devastated they must be.”

  “Have you met them?” Martínez asked.

  “No, they live in Los Palacios. Yarmi would visit them but they never came here, that I know of.”

  “Was she a close friend of yours?” Martínez asked. “Did she agree with your—work?”

  “Yarmila was not an ally,” Carmela answered. “I wouldn’t say she was with us, but she did sympathize with our work.”

  Martínez couldn’t help but say: “You mean she was a counterrevolutionary, like you?”

  “I was a revolutionary,” Carmela replied, becoming agitated. “I was taking part in the Literacy Campaign when you weren’t born yet. I put in more volunteer hours than anyone could count, so don’t come and tell me about the revolution! I fought for it and it betrayed me. Do you think I’m afraid of you or your uniform? Ha! Don’t kid yourself, compañerita. I am now freer than—”

  Her husband patted her hand reassuringly. “Calm down, dear,” he said. “This isn’t about us. The compañera just said so.”

  “That’s right,” Martínez said. “Let’s focus on citizen Yarmila Portal, okay? Did she cooperate with you?”

  Had Yarmila been in good terms with the government, behaving like a proper revolutionary, she would have been called a comrade. But she was not, so she was deemed a citizen. Carmela and Pablo, who had been called citizens for over a decade, were well aware of the distinction.

  Pablo nodded. “She did more than these people who say, ‘Oh, the government is so and so and I hate it,’ but don’t lift a finger to help us.”

  Martínez fought against her desire to ask who “these people” were.

  “Yarmila would send an email on our behalf when we couldn’t find any other way to do it,” he went on. “We don’t have access to the internet here and it is complicated, and expensive, to use the hotel terminals. The security guards wouldn’t let us in unless we pretended to be foreigners, and after a few times, they figured out who we were and stopped us. So Yarmi sent a message for us once or twice, but she also made it clear that it wasn’t going to be an everyday thing.”

  “She probably didn’t want to jeopardize her own internet access,” Carmela added. “I’m sure her boss at the Institute of Literature and Linguistics read every message that she sent or received.”

  “What else did she do for you?”

  The couple hesitated. While waiting for their answer, Martínez looked around. The apartment was modest at best, with no big TV set or any shiny appliances in sight. The furniture was old. The sofa where she sat had a spring out of place. Maybe these two were being shortchanged by the CIA.

  “That was pretty much it,” Pablo said at last. “We were friends, but she wouldn’t write an article about how real life is here, or even translate ours, something she could have easily done because she knew English well.”

  “She just wanted to play with her silly food blog,” Carmela said. “I always thought it was ironic. ‘What kind of food do you write about?’ I would ask her. ‘Soy mince? Mop-tassel steak?’ She would laugh.”

  “The mop-tassel steak is an urban legend,” Martínez felt compelled to say. “Have you ever eaten one?”

  “No, but I know people who did! What does it matter, anyway? The truth is, she was fishing—” Carmela cut herself off.

  “Fishing?” Martínez feigned ignorance. “For what?”

  “Don’t play dumb with me, compañerita! I’m almost old enough to be your mother so don’t go and try to put your fingers in my mouth. Yarmila wanted to catch a foreigner and the blog was her hook.”

  “Carmela!” her husband got red in the face. “How can you—?”

  “The naked truth is always better than the best dressed lie,” she replied, adding in a softer tone, “but I understand she was solving her problems, like everybody else. I am not blaming her.”

  There was a pause. Carmela excused herself and went to the kitchen. Soon, the pungent smell of black beans permeated the room. Martínez noticed a buffet and hutch set identical to one she had at home. Hers had been repainted white. The couple’s pieces had kept their original brown finish.

  “Being a smart girl, Yarmi wanted a better life,” Pablo said, almost apologetically. “She did what she thought was right. Because . . . what was here for her? Nada! Everything in this country is upside down. When a Cuban national is kicked out of a former ‘bourgeois’ hotel to make room for a foreigner, when people who were once accused of being traitors come back from Miami showing off their cash and buying things in stores revolutionaries aren’t allowed to set foot in, things are bad. Very bad.”

  “Those were just temporary measures,” Martínez mumbled. “There was a reason for austerity, back in the nineties. It isn’t like that anymore. You can enter any dollar or CUC shop now.”

  Carmela came back.

  “But Cubans aren’t paid in dollars or CUCs!” she exclaimed. “What good does it do?”

  Martínez looked at the flag to avoid the couple’s eyes. She wanted to ask them if they didn’t get American money but didn’t want to ruin the conversation. “Well, we aren’t discussing politics,” she hurried to say. “You said you guys were friends with Yarmila. Did you go out together?”

  “She didn’t have a lot of free time to go out,” Carmela said. “We aren’t social butterflies either. Because of our reputation as gusanos, many people, even relatives, have shunned us. But she did us some favors that we really appreciated. That’s why we trusted her. She was a real friend.”

  “What kind of favors?”

  “A couple of months ago she sold me an electric fan at a very good price—twelve dollars. I insisted on paying for it, though she wanted to just give it to us.”

  An electric fan cost fifty dollars in the store and no less than thirty on the black market.

  “Why would she do that?” Martínez asked. “You could have gotten it from the Americans, right?”

  “That’s what you people think,” Carmela replied angrily, “and it is so not true. We are paid per article, but not a fortune, and this is our only source of income. The government won’t hire us. How are we going to eat? We write for dollars, yes, but we are not ‘mercenaries,’ as you guys like to call us!”

  “Who pays you?” Martínez asked, again unable to contain herself.

  “The manager of the website that publishes our articles. Sometimes the papers, if they run our stories. What, are you thinking the CIA? You people are obsessed with that. Qué comemierdas! I wouldn’t know a CIA agent if I found one in my black beans!”

  She was getting excited again. Pablo chimed in. “We are not professional journalists,” he admitted. “But people outside of Cuba read what we write. We simply do our job and are compensated for it.”

  “What do you write about, exactly?” Martínez asked. Except for what she had read in the expedientes, she knew little about the details of their work. Not having access to the internet, she had never seen any of the independent journalists’ websites.

  “Li
fe in Cuba,” Carmela answered. “Problems with water, food, human rights issues, political prisoners. Things that happen to us or that we hear about. I may write an article for Cubanet about your visit today.”

  “Huh, thanks for making me a celebrity.” Martínez tried to sound sarcastic. She didn’t know what Cubanet was, but she imagined her name read by millions of Yumas. In spite of herself, and for a fleeting moment, she relished the idea.

  “So, even if she didn’t offer to work with us, Yarmi was always interested in our work,” Carmela brought the conversation back to the matter at hand. “She asked intelligent questions and didn’t try to convince us to give up our ideas. I saw her as a symbol of the younger generation, generous and hardworking. I kept hoping she would become an independent journalist someday.”

  “Did she tell you she would?”

  “Not really. But she left a door open. I mean, she never said never.”

  Carmela felt relaxed enough to smile. Her husband nodded. The initial tension had diluted. The couple felt happy that someone was listening to them without arguing (too much), someone outside their own circle, even if that “someone” was a cop. A respectful, well-mannered one. Besides, they understood why a young woman like Martínez would still call herself a revolutionary.

  As for Marlene, she was also softening toward them. These people didn’t look like dangerous criminals or CIA agents. Their home wasn’t too different from hers. They might have been gusanos, but they were decent ones.

  “I understand,” she said. “Now tell me, when did you see her for the last time?”

  “On Saturday, March first,” Carmela said. “My birthday, by the way. We met at La Caldosa for lunch.”

  “The three of you?”

  “No, just me and her. Yarmi took me out to celebrate. She always made these nice little gestures. She told me that her boyfriend was coming on Wednesday and said she’d like for us to meet him. It was okay with me, provided he wasn’t one of those Americans who come here for two weeks and try to convince us that we live in paradise.”