The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria

by Carlos Hernandez

  Once we make the first contact with him, Tito assumes we’re going to tail him so we can get film footage on him before the hit. So he and Miguel have to start playing their parts. He fakes a big fight with Miguel at his abuela’s apartment in front of his friends and abuela, whom he sometimes forgets is in the room. She, however, sees everything with her big horse eyes and doesn’t know the fight is fake. Later that month, she hears Tito on the phone, talking to Xavier, arranging the hit on Miguel. Though her English is rocky, she catches the drift of the conversation. She is terrified.

  For the first time since she poisoned him with her toothache remedy, she comes alive. She confronts him. And since he thinks we’ve bugged the place, he confirms her worst fears—he is paying someone ten thousand dollars to kill Miguel. She pleads with him. Threatens him with eternal damnation. He laughs and says, “Look around, old woman! You’re already damned!” He thinks that’s a good line for television and hopes we will use it.

  Tito and Xavier arrange a meeting. He leaves the address on the kitchen table for his abuela to see—that is how impotent he thinks she is. But she has resolved to save Tito from himself. She steals ten thousand dollars from the GruuvyJuuce safe, where she is a shift manager, and, on her lunch break, takes it to Xavier before Tito’s meeting is to occur.

  Remember Xavier after his meeting with Abuela? He couldn’t wait until morning to try and make everything right. He has to find her, set everything straight. But he doesn’t know where to find Tito or his abuela. The only person he has any information on is Miguel. So he goes to see Miguel at his job. GruuvyJuuce.

  Miguel had trouble telling us about the conversation he had with Xavier at GruuvyJuuce. He kept saying, “He was a good man. He just wanted to fix everything.”

  But in spite of all the new wrinkles, Miguel, who’d been carrying cyanide with him since Tito’s first conversation with Xavier, stuck to the plan. He told Xavier that he would call Tito’s abuela and have her come to his hotel to collect the money. Xavier was frazzled, febrile with guilt. He wouldn’t have been hard to convince.

  Miguel even gave him a mamey shake. On the house.

  I am not heartless. But I believe in justice. And this time, that meant revenge.

  But you have to know how to work it. Otherwise you make too many sacrifices. I wasn’t going to shoot those two little comemierdas myself, and I wasn’t, in some made-for-television act of supreme stupidity, going to hire a hit man to kill them either. Why would I have to, when the government is more than happy to take care of the details for me? I have plenty of money. All I do is hire a pack of bloodthirsty lawyers to go to court and prove that Tito and Miguel should be tried as adults, and poof!, they’re tried as adults.

  I hear you saying: “Okay, but there’s no death penalty in New York.” That’s true, but that just means the government won’t go through the hassle of killing them itself. Instead, they’re going to be incarcerated with hundreds of hardened criminals who know what those two skinny little putos have done. You know how many fan letters a week we get from American jails? If I were Tito or Miguel, right now I would be praying to God for a heart attack before I set foot in prison.

  But here’s how you know I’m not heartless. I’ve hired lawyers for abuelita. Right now, they’re negotiating with GruuvyJuuce, trying to convince them of what a PR coup it would be for them to drop the charges, especially since we returned the money she stole. I think it’s going to work. My lawyers are good.

  So everything’s about as right as I can make it. But it’s not right in any objective sense. Poor Xavier is forever dead.

  But usually good enough is all there is. You work with the money, talent, and time you have to make everything the best it can be. That’s all you can do.

  Well, and develop a taste for limes.

  More Than Pigs and Rosaries Can Give

  “I’m opening your mail, Pedrito!” Sophie yelled from the kitchen.

  “That’s nice,” I mumbled back. I was sitting shirtless in my white-leather baseball-watching recliner, witnessing the Marlins getting Hemingwayed by the Yanks 10-3. It was like one of those mobster movies where you watch the only wiseguy who deep down is a decent person get shot 54 times in slo-mo. Not exactly the time to respond to Sophie’s provocations.

  But when a commercial break finally euthanized the inning, I did respond. “¿What are you doing opening my mail, vieja entrometia?” I yelled back to her. Her Spanish wasn’t the greatest, but I’d called her a nosy old lady plenty of times before. She knew that phrase all too well.

  I smiled and turned back to the beer commercials, but I guess I had the TV turned up too loud. I never heard her pad up behind me. Then she sprung: she reached over the chair and pulled my nipples so hard she turned them into dunce caps.

  I yelped, begged for mercy. Mercy was slow in coming, but finally she tucked her mouth into my neck, tender as can be, and said, “That’s for calling me ‘vieja.’” Only then did she release them.

  I pressed a kiss into her cheek. “You started it. And anyway, I like viejas. You’re only 54. You think we fuck now, wait ‘til you’re 77. You’re going to have to join the hip-replacement-of-the-month club.”

  She produced the pages of a handwritten letter, shook them under my nose. “Do you want your mail or not?”

  “¿Who’s it from?”

  “Gustavito.”

  “¿Who else?” Gustavito—the craziest of all my Cuban cousins. “¿What’s he scheming now?”

  “He says he found Milhuevos.”

  Sophie didn’t move a millimeter. She was waiting to see how I’d react. Maybe I’d be austere, reverential, in keeping with the seriousness of the news she’d given me. Maybe I’d be pissed at her for making light of some of the most serious news we’d ever received. But that’s the Cuban way: mix a few shit-jokes and pranks in with the heartbreak, or you won’t make it through another day. Our marriage never would have lasted if we stayed mad every time we fucked with each other. 80% of our communication was mindfucks.

  But 20% was pure tenderness. “Mámi,” I said. “¿He really found Mámi? ¿What’d he find, exactly? ¿Her remains?”

  “I’m not sure. Look here,” she said, pointing to a word in the letter. “He said he found her ‘paredón.’ What’s that?”

  I laughed. “Mi vida, I love you so much I forget sometimes you’re not Cuban. So okay, if a ‘pared’ is a wall, a ‘paredón’ is a big mother-fucking wall. Kids could play handball against it, you could stick a full-sized billboard advertisement on it, Diego Rivera could paint the entire epic history of a lost civilization on it, that big.” And then, gently, I added, “Also, it’s a great place to line up people and shoot them.”

  “Like Che did to your mom,” she completed. She curled up a little more in my lap and shuddered. Then, thoughtfully, she added, “Gustavito’s sure they found the right place, but I thought that town had been abandoned.” I nodded. “How can he be sure?”

  Ever the journalist, mi vida. But I had skimmed the second half of the letter. “He found a historian. Someone who works at one of the museums of the Revolution. He’s been doing research. It looks like … oh Christ. Oh Christ on a cracker.”

  “What?”

  I laughed. “It seems our good historian Jesús has a side-business. He finds suckers—sorry, I mean Americans—like me and offers to find where their loved ones had been executed by the Cuban Revolution and recovers the soul for them. Gustavito thinks Jesús can help us communicate with my long-dead mother.”

  “Get the fuck to Carthage,” said Sophie, snatching the letter from me. As she read, joy and wonder beamed behind her eyes. “I knew something crazy was going on. But my Spanish wasn’t up to deciphering how crazy. I love your family!”

  “Me too, mi vida,” I said, a little more melancholy than I’d intended. “It’s total bullshit, you know.”

  “I don’t know. You’re the cynic of the family. I’m open to new possibilities.”

  “¿So, what? ¿You thin
k we should go?”

  I could feel the incredulity radiating from her head. “Are you kidding? Of course we’re going! What’s wrong with you?”

  Sitting on the plane waiting for take-off, I reread Gustavito’s letter. Not much to go on: Gustavito’s way better in person than on the page. So I closed my eyes and tried to remember everything I could about Mámi.

  It wasn’t much. She was executed before I was two. Most of what I knew about her was how she died.

  Cuba, 1959: Castro’s coup had, against all odds, succeeded. Che had just won a decisive battle at Santa Clara. As he headed for Havana to join Fidel and the other revolutionary generals, he stopped at places along the way, holding “trials” to punish Batista loyalists. Now don’t get me wrong: Batista was an hijo de la gran puta, and plenty of people who worked for him were his corrupt little putos, building their fortunes off the misery of others. But there were also the decent government functionaries who simply did the necessary bureaucratic work of keeping Cuba going. It was hard to tell who was a bastard and who was just trying to keep society afloat. So you held trials to separate the guilty from the innocent, ¿right?

  Wrong. This was a revolution. There needed to be executions. So Che would accuse you of sympathizing with Batista, then you’d offer your defense, then you were found guilty, then he’d stand you in front of a paredón, then a firing squad ripped you apart. Most of those executions took place in La Cabaña prison in Havana, but Che perfected his “pedagogy of the paredón” on the way there. The secret was to get the crowd to demand blood. Then the deaths aren’t on you; it’s the will of the people. “¡Pa-re-dón!” the people yelled. Their new government simply obliged them.

  Mámi had worked as secretary to the mayor in the little town of Brota Flor. According to Pápi, the mayor was a likable, handsome sleazebag, all pomaded hair and New York suits. None too bright, and a zángano to boot: always looking for an angle instead of an honest day’s work. So it fell to young Mámi to keep the town running behind the scenes.

  This she did for almost a decade. But then when Che came rolling through, the townspeople, caught up in revolutionary fervor, told him that it wasn’t enough just to fusillade the mayor. Mámi was the real bureaucratic brains of the town. If anyone in town had served Batista’s interests, it was she.

  The trials were over in minutes. Guilty. Now, the fun part. ¡Pa-re-dón!

  When the mayor was brought forth to be executed, he fell to his knees. He wept and coughed and begged for his life. When they went to tie and blindfold him, he tucked himself into a ball and refused to rise. The crowd jeered. “¿What kind of a maricón are you? ¡Stand up and die like a man!” But he remained in that fetal position, wailing into his own crotch. In the end, they had to roll him like an egg up to the paredón to shoot him. Pápi said that his body froze in that position; they couldn’t straighten him out after that. His widow, goes the story, had to order a custom oval coffin to bury him in.

  Then it was Mámi’s turn. She shook herself free of the guards’ grip and strode to the paredón of her own accord, not even bothering to step around the patch of ground soaked with the mayor’s blood. There she stood, all 5’2” of her, wearing the same practical dress she wore to work every day. She had her hands behind her back like a soldier at ease. She refused a blindfold; instead, she stared down the firing squad, moving from face to boyish face, locking eyes. When a guard offered her a cigarette, she smacked the entire pack out of his hand. The crowd whooped. Here was someone who knew how to die.

  On Che’s command, the men pointed their guns at her. She raised her chin. Che asked her if she had any last words. He was smiling, Pápi remembered. It was an appreciative smile, warrior to warrior.

  Mámi said, “You are all cowards, hiding behind your guns. You know this is wrong. ¿What have I done except work for your benefit all these years? But not one of you had the courage to rise to my defense. There isn’t a set of eggs between the legs of any man here. ¡I’ve bled more eggs out during my period than all the men in Brota Flor have in their pants, combined! And I die today with a thousand eggs inside me that I’ll never get to use. What a shame, because I’ve only given birth to one boy, and Cuba needs brave and honorable men more than ever. This generation is lost.”

  Che laughed a little, smoked a little. He waited to be sure Mámi had nothing to add. Time held its breath. And then from Che, an afterthought. “Fire.”

  There were no more executions that day. There were four other men who’d been sentenced, but Mámi’s words had shamed the townsfolk, drained them of their bloodlust. Che pardoned the remaining doomed and left quickly.

  Among the pardoned were my three uncles. The fourth was Pápi.

  My uncles decided to stay in Cuba, though they moved out of town quickly enough. But Pápi had already had enough of Fidel’s new order. He hustled me out of Cuba the moment my mother was buried. We came to Miami and he made friends with other expatriated Cubans. He joined the Bay of Pigs invasion, but was part of a unit that was never deployed. Afterwards, he worked as a meatpacker, and remarried, and gave me a typical Cuban-American upbringing: lots of love, lots of hitting, and a steady IV drip of nostalgia for a Cuba that never was.

  And Mámi, though dead, lived on. Her speech became legend. Ever since her execution, no one called her by her given name. Instead, they called her “Milhuevos.” The woman with a thousand eggs.

  Our plane wheeled over Havana a good three and three-quarters times before we started our descent, giving those of us with window seats a beautiful establishing shot of the City of Columns.

  Havana is beautiful. But in a cemetery kind of way. When you get on the street, there is color, flora, propaganda, joy; but from above, the buildings look short and sun-bleached, and there is almost none of the metal and glass of modern architecture. Fly into Havana sometime, you’ll see. It looks like it’s three-quarters graveyard.

  (And I know what you’re thinking: “Oh, you’re just one of those comemierda Cuban-American ideologues who can’t say a single nice thing about Cuba. Of course you would describe Havana as a necropolis.” But I’m no ideologue. I’m a misanthrope. Every society is ruled by the worst people it can generate. We all get exactly the governments we deserve.)

  José Martí International Airport was clean, well-maintained, and very orange. We picked up our bags and made our way to customs. It cost me a small fortune, because besides our personal luggage I’d brought four huge suitcases to leave behind for my extended family. One was stuffed to bursting with over-the-counter medicines, bandages, rubbing alcohol, soap, laundry detergent, 25 toothbrushes, toothpaste, and a two-year supply of 100-microgram synthroid for Gusvativo’s hypothyroidism. Two suitcases were clothes, especially women’s delicates, plus one boy’s suit and one girl’s dress for First Communion that would be passed between family and friends for the next decade. And one of them was nothing but Café Bustelo, 134 vacuum-sealed bricks of Cuban-style espresso. Gustavito told me there was almost no coffee in Cuba right now. Let me repeat that: almost no coffee in Cuba. It is unthinkable. Unacceptable. Cubans are three things: coffee, sugar, and coño tu madre. I could at least bring the coffee.

  I paid a guy dressed like a bellhop from a ‘30s movie to handle the bags, and we exited the airport. As soon as we walked outside we saw a crowd of Cubans waiting behind a black metal fence to pick up their relatives. Among all the laughing and crying and whooping we were finally able to pick out Gustavito, hands in pockets, rocking on his heels, smiling like Puck.

  Next to him was a tall black man in a buttoned-up guayabera and cargo shorts and sandals. The man had a severe case of vitiligo. Really, from what I could see he was only half-black: over his face and arms and legs, continents of white floated atop an ocean of pitch. I have to tell you, that man was beautiful. He looked like some piebald prophet come to carry humanity onto its next evolution.

  Oh, and the black/white man had a pert sow sitting next to him. On a leash.

  “Welcome to Cuba,”
Sophie said into my ear.

  When we were near enough, Gustavito called out, “¡Fuckee you, mane!” This was our thing; he knows how much I love it when he curses in English. I responded with: “¿Qué tal, culosucio?” which means, “¿How’s it going, filthy-ass?” It’s better in Spanish.

  We embraced, and then he embraced Sophie while apologizing for using profanity in a way that made clear he wasn’t at all sorry. Both the black/white man and the pig smiled at us and waited to be introduced. “This is Jesús,” Gustavito said. “The historian who is going to help us.”

  I shook hands with him seriously. “Mucho gusto,” I said.

  “It’s an honor to meet the son of Milhuevos,” he said. I didn’t see any attempt from him to wear the colors of the saints, and he had a big, quick smile. Cuba’s poverty makes it hard to judge people by appearances; people take what they can get, not necessarily what they would choose. But the babalawos I’ve known spent most of their time trying to look badass and mysterious: wide-eyed, smileless, stentorian, purposefully vague, etc. Jesús, by contrast, came across as a nice guy with an amazing skin condition and a sincere handshake who happened to traffic in the recovery of lost spirits. Interesting.

  When I was done staring at him, it was time for Jesús and Sophie to meet. “I’m Sophie,” said Sophie. “I’m a journalist. If you don’t mind, I’ve love to ask you a few questions about your work.”

  “Jesús,” said Jesús. “I will gladly answer any question you put to me.”

  “Great! First question: who’s your friend?”

  “¿This?” Jesús replied, giving the leash a tug. “¿Fat, isn’t she? In a few hours, this will either be Pedro’s mother, or tonight’s dinner.”

  The sow looked up at Sophie, smiling widely, as if nothing would please her more than to become either.