Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  East Egg—is that what it’s called? Deke Havelin was a wealthy and successful rayon magnate, and El Country Club, where the Havelins lived, was our version of East Egg. It was over the Almendares River, which divided the city, and mostly rich Americans lived out there. El Country Club was gated and private, with a lake, a golf course, and palaces that were built in the twenties, during the Dance of the Millions, when everybody made a killing in sugar. Imitations of Versailles, with long, mirrored hallways. Promenades lit with frosted globes as big as the globe in Daddy’s den, which lit up on the inside and gave off a ghostly blue when you shut off the other lights. Deke was a friend of Daddy’s, and Christmas at their place in Havana was a real to-do, certainly more exciting than staying in Preston and decorating a breadfruit tree.

  Daddy took me to see Sugar Ray Robinson fight at the Havana Sports Palace. The famous Cuban boxer Kid Chocolate, who had been world champion in the thirties, was master of ceremonies, which was a thrill. When Daddy had work to do, Mother and I swam in the saltwater swimming pool at the Yacht Club. They had a tiled bar on one end, and you could sip a virgin banana daiquiri without leaving the water. If it was high tide, waves lapped over the pool’s seaside wall and sent you bobbing like a skiff. It was odd to be there without Del, but I have to admit it was also a relief. By then, Del and I weren’t close. He was moody, and always off with Phillip Mackey, fishing with a group of young Cuban employees from the nickel mine. At dinner he would argue with Daddy, say contrary and ugly things out of nowhere. I think he got a lot of it from Phillip.

  “Did you know Batista force-feeds people castor oil?” Del asked once of no one in particular. “Isn’t that nice, Mother? Maybe we can ask him about it next time he comes for dinner.”

  “Listen to you,” Daddy said. “Maybe you need a little castor oil yourself. Maybe I’ll talk to Batista about it.”

  That quieted Del for the rest of dinner. But as we were eating dessert, he started up again. “Father, how much do we pay that gorilla?”

  Daddy ignored the question and asked me about my schoolwork, as if Del wasn’t worth answering.

  As Del was getting up from the table he said, “Don’t you think it’s funny that we teach them agriculture, and none of them own any land?”

  That’s when Daddy blew up.

  “You got a problem with how things are run around here, then get off your ass and do something about it!” He slammed his fist on the table and made all the silverware jump. “Instead of sitting there with a linen napkin in your lap like a goddamn pantywaist, eating grub I pay for, the flan you asked your nanny to make you like you’re five years old. Go do something. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Nothing but a spoiled goddamn brat.”

  Mother, Daddy, and I went to see Xavier Cugat at the Cabaret Tokio that Christmas. Their main theater was outside, but air-conditioned. I don’t know how they did that. We sat under royal palms, colored searchlights crisscrossing red and green, parrots flying over us, cutting through the beams of colored light. A flock of them lived in the palm trees at the Tokio. We’d seen Xavier Cugat perform many times. He’d recorded the “Chiquita Banana” jingle for the company’s radio and television spots, and he was friendly with Daddy.

  Xavier Cugat kept a little Chihuahua in his coat pocket. The band started, and finally he walked out, everybody clapping, and the dog jumped from his pocket and trotted around the stage. When I was little, I got up from our table and went and sat on the edge of the stage and played with Xavier Cugat’s little dog while he was performing. No one minded or said a word about it. That Christmas, Mother and Daddy ribbed me about getting up onstage, but I’d outgrown that.

  Daddy took us to the Floridita for dinner after Xavier Cugat’s show. The dining room was full and we didn’t have a reservation, so they seated us at the bar. You might know that the Floridita was Hemingway’s hangout. Sure enough, just after we ordered, his raw, pink face filled the mirror above the liquor bottles. Daddy said Hemingway was crude and obscene. He talked about him like they were mortal enemies, but Hemingway walked right by us and I don’t think he knew Daddy from Adam.

  I ordered lobster. The lobster they brought me was pregnant, and when I cut into it an orange liquid oozed out—the eggs. I didn’t think I could eat it, but Daddy said I should think of a pregnant lobster as a delicacy. That anything unseemly could be made tolerable if you told yourself it was a special thing, an exclusive thing. Like caviar, he said. I told him I hated caviar, and Daddy said it wasn’t about taste, it was about having things that other people couldn’t have, and there was a certain burden in that.

  Hemingway parked himself at the bar and began chatting with his neighbor on the next stool, a slick-looking fellow in an expensive suit and tinted glasses. Somebody put coins in the jukebox, and Augustin Lara started singing “Mujer.” That song was on our jukebox at the Pan-American Club. It was a popular song, and apparently Hemingway knew the words. He asked the bartender for change, and then punched in selections himself, still singing along with “Mujer.”

  He sat back down, and “La Pachanga” came on. That was another popular song. Hemingway was doing the whistle parts along with the song. He turned to this slick-looking guy, who was sitting at the bar minding his own business.

  “You do the pachanga?” Hemingway asked.

  The guy nodded like he didn’t really understand, then looked away.

  “The pachanga,” Hemingway said, louder. “Like the song. Or maybe cha-cha? If you know cha-cha, you can learn pachanga.”

  “I’m afraid I do neither.” He had some kind of European accent.

  “A rumba, then?” Hemingway was humming and snapping his fingers.

  The fellow shook his head. “I sit at the bar. That’s what I do.”

  “Don’t get huffy. I asked if you do a pachanga. Who says men can’t dance?”

  I felt bad for the guy. It seemed like he wanted to be left alone. But those are always the ones who get the onslaught. Then again, if you really want to be left alone, you have a drink in your room, by yourself.

  “Look, ah, I’m not a friend of the family, shall we say.”

  “I’ve got news for you: I go to Paris—I sleep at the Ritz—and everybody over there—you are French, aren’t you?—every one of them is a friend of the family. Even the women. So how about some cha-cha? Because the rumba—have you heard? They’re talking about outlawing it.”

  “Is that so.”

  “But they shouldn’t.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “It’s a crime to outlaw the rumba!”

  Hemingway wasn’t exactly shouting, but his talking voice was louder than the music and the room murmur. I think everyone in the bar was listening, the way I was.

  “Even if it’s so sexy it forces people,” Hemingway said, “to do naughty things. That’s the curse of the rumba, and I’ve seen it. Men hiking up women’s skirts and humping them right on the dance floor. It’s probably happening in some back alley right now. I mean this second, while I’m sitting here talking to you. Me, I’ve got a back problem. Still make love good, but not standing up. Do you know why they shouldn’t outlaw the rumba?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Because people need diversions. Sex is a healthy diversion. A very effective diversion.”

  “I suppose I can agree with you there,” the Frenchman said.

  Hemingway insisted they toast. “To humping.”

  They held up their drinks.

  It’s a typical scenario, drunk people carving out worlds as they get drunker, making pacts about what’s important and what isn’t in a couple of lost and forgettable hours. But when you’re thirteen, you don’t realize it doesn’t count, that both those men could enter the bar the very next day and act as if they’ve never seen each other before. Perhaps repeat the conservation word for word, as if for the first time.

  They were still talking when the waiter brought the dessert cart around and did the flambé routine for us. It was Mother’s favo
rite part of going to the Floridita. She said they made the best flambé in town.

  “I’ll confess,” Hemingway said, “that I cannot dance rumba to save my life. Like I said, this damn bad back. Listen to me—I said this, I do that—too many goddamn ‘I’s. You know what I should do? Every time I want to say ‘I,’ I’ll substitute something else, ‘Your Operative,’ or maybe ‘This Task Force.’ In any case, ‘Your Operative’ is not a skilled dancer. What he knows is fiction. It’s a very unhealthy diversion. Unless you can give it a high moral tone, which ‘This Task Force’ has failed to do. We need more poets. I once broke a poet’s jaw. I feel bad about it, but he asked me to. More or less. Do you write poetry?”

  “I don’t think so,” the Frenchman said. “In fact, no.”

  “Because you smell like a high-level civil servant, see, and they used to send us poets. Poet-diplomats, like Perse. Or Valéry—”

  “Claudel,” the Frenchman interjected.

  “Exactly! Let me buy you another, my friend. Double whatever he’s having. And a double for me as well. And a Ballantine’s, because I’m very very thirsty. What was I saying? Oh, yes, men who type poems on embassy stationery. Send alexandrines to the State Department. Or just a single phrase. A wonderful question. It’s a gift to ask the right question.”

  “This is a fact,” the Frenchman said, and then they were toasting their doubles to the art of questions.

  “Hell is breaking loose in French West Africa,” Hemingway said.

  “Indeed it is,” the Frenchman agreed. “Indeed it is. It will be quite interesting to see what evolves. A can swollen with botulism. Sometimes there is a healthy botulism, you know. A ‘good’ botulism—”

  “Like I was saying,” Hemingway said, cutting him off, “hell is breaking loose in French West Africa, and Saint-John Perse sends an embassy report back to France, one sentence. A single sentence. And it’s a question: ‘Is the Pink Lake of Dakar pink, or is it mauve?’ That’s his report!”

  “I can tell you that it’s mauve,” the Frenchman said.

  I don’t think Hemingway was listening.

  “They used to send us diplomats,” he said, draining his drink and starting on the Ballantine’s, “who didn’t dare talk about the price of sugar, the price of nickel, insurgent stunts on wireless radio. They sent us men like Perse, who asked, instead, what has the world given us ‘but this swaying of grass.’ They used to send us poets. Now they send us guys like you. Who don’t even dance the pachanga.”

  A driver took us down Calle San Rafael after dinner. They had fake snow and an elaborate manger set up, with life-sized department store mannequins that El Encanto donated from its window displays. The fanfare was all for us Anglos. The Cubans don’t make such a big deal about Christmas—they have the Three Kings, that’s in early January—but the president’s wife gave out gifts on Christmas morning to children from the slums. It goes without saying that there were huge divisions between rich and poor in Cuba. You could look at a map of Havana and wonder about these massive areas, with ominous names like Cueva del Humo—cave of smoke—but the way the city was laid out, we never passed through a single slum. Mrs. Batista handed the gifts out herself, on the front lawn of the presidential palace. Hundreds of kids came to receive them. When the president and Mrs. Batista arrived at the Havelins’ party, Mother complimented the first lady on her Christmas gift tradition. Mother said it was this type of gesture—modest and specific—that just might save the world.

  The Havelins’ party was formal formal—greased hair, coat and tie, white bucks. Daddy wore a tuxedo and joked that you could take the hillbilly out of Mississippi but not the reverse. Mother had on a white bouffant gown. I remember it. She leaned in to kiss me, and the puffy fabric of her skirt made a soft, crunching noise. Dolly’s father, Mr. Becquer, had commented that I’d be a lady-killer someday. Mother leaned in and kissed my forehead and said I was her peach and still a one-woman boy. The ambassador was there—not available when your plantation is burning down, but right as rain at a bash with champagne and movie stars. In his white suit, thinning hair plastered back, a tall fellow with coat-hanger shoulders. Face so suntanned that even by expat standards he looked ridiculous. He was a snobbish type with a Yale class ring, and when I think of him and Daddy in the Havelins’ living room, sitting in club chairs with cocktails in their hands, tuxedo or no, Daddy does seem like a hillbilly by comparison. Daddy may have been the Cuba manager of United Fruit, but he was in backward Oriente, not Boston or New York. The people who mattered in Ambassador Smith’s world were the financiers and CEOs, not the guy who hires the agronomist, deals with the day-to-day of cane crushing, of labor politics and revolt.

  A guy was playing Gershwin melodies on the Havelins’ grand piano. He stopped playing, and Dolly Havelin clinked a spoon against the side of her glass. People quieted down, and servants circulated the room with trays of poured champagne, making sure everyone had a glass. The servants were done up like French maids, in short skirts and little starched pillbox hats.

  Dolly Havelin clinked her glass again to get our attention. Deke Havelin stood up and spoke.

  “Everyone have a little bubbly?” Deke asked.

  “We’ve got a special guest here tonight I’d like to toast. I’ll give you a hint: Who’s the most important man in Cuba?” Deke looked around. “Not you, Smith.”

  Everyone laughed, including the ambassador.

  “I refer, of course, to President Batista.”

  Batista and his wife were sitting at a special table, decorated with crepe. They both smiled a lot, which I realized later was about photography. People who are used to having their picture taken know to keep their faces placid and camera-ready at all times.

  Deke paused to retrieve a little piece of paper from his tuxedo pocket. He unfolded it and read.

  “One evening, one of the many lovely evenings I’ve had the enormous pleasure to spend with the president, he asked me, ‘Deke, what do you really think of Cuba, an American like yourself, who’s spent so many years here? Do you love it as your own country?’ Well, I didn’t have to think twice about that one. ‘Claro que sí,’ I said to the president.”

  I don’t know if it was ceremonial—you know, acting—but Deke wiped tears from his eyes.

  “I’ll make this short. It’s quite an honor to call this marvelous country home. And now, to call myself Cubano. It’s just wonderful. I feel like I’m dreaming. And so I want to make a toast.” Deke held up his glass. “To President Batista, and to Cuba, which the Havelin family always has, and always will, love as our own.”

  Everyone raised a glass in the direction of the president’s table.

  “And by the way,” Deke said, “Dolly and I broke out the good stuff, so drink up now and you won’t feel a thing later on, when we start uncorking the rotgut.”

  People laughed, and there was a lot of applause. The pianist started in on a tune, and Deke twirled Dolly around the dance floor as everyone watched. He dipped her dramatically, and everybody laughed and applauded again.

  Batista had offered Deke Havelin Cuban citizenship, and Deke had accepted. I knew it had something to do with wealth and keeping it protected, but I had no idea Deke was in serious legal trouble in the States. I was thirteen, and suddenly in that wild state that puberty flings boys into, and preoccupied with other things—girls, for instance. There were some pretty ones at the Havelins’ that day, and I felt like I was noticing girls for the first time in my life. I guess there were kids my age who were into all that before I was, but I was a late bloomer. Maybe it had to do with Mother, something complicated about my loyalty to her. I married very late, after Mother had already died, and perhaps there’s a reason for that. Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball were at the Christmas party—they were friends of the Havelins, friendly with Daddy. Mother and Daddy had gone to their wedding reception in Santiago. I was hot on the heels of a niece they brought to the party, Elisia Arnaz, a pretty girl with white-blond hair like mine, who talked with a li
sp that made her sound like she was from Spain except I don’t think she could help it. For years I’d watched how Phillip Mackey operated, and I remember adopting his style a bit to flirt with Elisia Arnaz. Phillip had this way of looking girls right in the eye, even if he wasn’t that interested.

  I was wrapped up in looking Elisia Arnaz in the eye as if I wasn’t afraid of her, and it didn’t occur to me that Deke Havelin was giving up his American citizenship. I figured it was like Batista was giving him the key to the city, a purely ceremonial thing.

  Dolly’s family, the Becquers, had come from Philadelphia, but they’d been in Cuba for more than a century, since long before the Spanish-American War. They had their own mausoleum in Colón, the big cemetery in Havana—black marble with yellow Lalique windows, air-conditioning, and an elevator to the underground tombs. They’d bought themselves Spanish titles—Casa or Marqués de this or that, Gentleman of the Bedchamber of the Queen—which not only made them sound pompous and important but also transferred all litigation against them to Spain, causing so many delays that they could never be taken to court for anything, never had to pay any debts, and had built up a great deal of wealth back when Cuba was still a Spanish colony. Kind of like Deke Havelin getting out of his legal issues by changing passports. I don’t think that’s a coincidence: rich people are clever about holding on to money. Becquer was originally Baker, but they’d been in Cuba so long they Hispanicized it. Deke Havelin didn’t Hispanicize his name, but maybe he would have if things had gone differently.

  Watching him twirl Dolly around the dance floor, I guess I figured it was a good thing Batista had done for Deke, if it meant the Havelins got to keep the mansion and the swimming pool with its bamboo cabañas, the gardens and tennis court, the fourteen-foot Virginia pine Christmas tree, which had come all the way from North Florida in a chilled shipping container, in the Havelins’ living room with an avalanche of presents underneath it. Those were happy times. Why not take measures to make the happiness last?