Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  Despite being trapped in a soggy mountain camp for several days—twelve or thirteen, so many that he’d stopped counting—there were moments when La Mazière genuinely enjoyed himself, destroying his new friends at chess, and also canasta, which they taught him, and regaling them with stories of the Russian steppes, of smoking bitter tobacco that burned like hay, and seeing Mongolians on horseback come over a high mountain pass, men with rusted, czarist-era pistols and woven wool saddles. But unlike Hector and Valerio, neither of whom seemed bothered by their miserable living conditions, La Mazière was growing tired of being constantly wet and cold and hungry. For the past week, food rations had consisted solely of stale cassava bread. Mosquitoes attacked brazenly at all hours, leaving unpleasant lumps on his face and hands. And he suspected his feet might be rotting, though he hadn’t removed his shoes in several days to look. They were issued hammocks and no longer had to sleep on the ground, but this was a minor improvement, the uncomfortable canvas sling making La Mazière feel like someone else’s privates, crammed into a pair of damp swimming briefs. He tried to remind himself that the need for happiness was a mutilation of character, and that comfort and pleasures so quickly turned insipid. Why don’t you join me for a dye-quiry? At least he wasn’t in a drab and depressing motel, “safe,” and making hash of something real and unsafe. Only if you’ve been through it as we have, can you understand the terror of the hunted—The thought of those people, turning history into a poolside burlesque, made him glad to be where he was, in the heart of the action.

  After twenty days of continuous downpours, the rain finally let up. At the same time, Fidel Castro began a vigorous public relations campaign on Radio Rebelde, which was broadcast from La Plata, far south of them, but it came in clear enough. La Mazière’s unit gathered around the wireless each evening as Castro publicly invited journalists from Look, Life, Newsweek, and The New York Times up to the mountains, reading their names over the radio momentously, as if they were lottery winners, and then challenging them to witness for themselves who the rebels were and what they were fighting for. The public relations campaign was apparently working, American journalists lounging in Fidel’s camp, smoking cigars, flirting with the sexy soap flakes model who ran the radio station, and watching Castro kiss the feet of campesinos. La Mazière could have easily grafted himself to some sort of neutral convoy and made it safely to an airport.

  Yet he stayed. He had never planned on such a thing, fighting with bearded Cuban revolutionaries, half of them teenagers. But a definitive moment occurred in which he saw the potential for something grand.

  One afternoon, two lieutenants returned from scout duty with a captured member of Batista’s Rural Guard. An actual POW, gagged and bound with baling twine. Hector was napping, so the lieutenants came for instructions to La Mazière, regarded as something of an authority, an exotic who might harbor knowledge.

  “What do we do with him?” one of the lieutenants asked.

  “You know what we’re supposed to do,” the other said, his voice trembling. “All Rural Guard members are enemies of justice. They’re…they’re supposed to be assassinated—”

  “No no no,” La Mazière cut in, tsking and shaking his head gravely. “They are not to be assassinated.”

  The lieutenants both looked at him.

  “The proper term,” La Mazière said, “is executed.”

  “These are not the same thing?” one of them asked.

  La Mazière launched into a discourse on the critical distinction between the two. As he spoke, other rebels wandered over, until he had almost the entire unit of thirty men gathered around him, listening. One was spitting pistachio shells—they’d finally received more than stale cassava as food supplies—but lectures were no time for snacking. La Mazière shot him a look, and the offender quickly put away his bag of pistachios and stood at attention. Execution, La Mazière continued, his voice rising to be sure everyone heard, was an act of intent, purpose, and exactitude. Assassination was a far lower act, an act of opportunity, or worse, “necessity”—a word he said as if it were a soiled, smelly rag he held between two fingers. Execution was a ritualized killing, he emphasized. It was never, ever, an act of necessity. It was always an act of choice, a calculated delivery of justice. And only by the elevated loft of choice, he explained, could the act of killing take on symbolic meaning. Killing, he said, had meaning, voluptuous and mystical meaning that should never be squandered. An execution was a rhetorical weapon, a statement that could not be disproved, just as a man could not be restored from death.

  The rebels were quiet. Awed, he assumed. He decided the act itself should be part of his impromptu lecture, a complete lesson.

  He called the camp chaplain, who gave the Rural Guardsman his last rites. Watching the chaplain trace an oily cross on the prisoner’s forehead and place the Eucharist on his tongue, meager provision for the afterlife, La Mazière thought of the chaplain at Wildflecken, who rode a white horse and wore a silk soutane, his crucifix and iron cross jangling together on their separate gold chains.

  When the captive’s last rites were completed and he was properly blindfolded, La Mazière took out his knife and cleaned it on his pant leg until it shone.

  “Wait!” one of the younger rebels called out. “Shouldn’t he have a trial? I mean, I’m not saying he isn’t guilty. But shouldn’t we be like a court, and judge him guilty? Sentence him before we do this?”

  La Mazière sighed, summoning the patience he needed to teach this clueless boy the basic concepts of law and judgment. “I will explain this once,” he said, “so please, all of you, listen. This is a popular uprising. A popular movement. The people do not ‘judge’ in the same manner as courts of law. They do not hand down sentences. They throw lightning bolts. The people do not condemn Rural Guardsmen, or traitors, or kings. They drop them back into the void.”

  And then he quickly swiped his shining knife across the prisoner’s neck. Even with his eyes covered by the blindfold, the man’s face expressed jolting surprise. Under his chin, a quaking smile of red opened up.

  Two soldiers vomited in front of all the others, no time to turn away and disguise their weakness—physiologic, beyond their control—and because of this, all the more shameful. La Mazière pretended not to notice, as he might have pretended not to notice a woman’s inept methods and obvious sexual inexperience. People must be allowed to learn.

  That night, as they dipped fried plantain chips into a pot of beans, a meal a campesino’s wife brought into camp, the men were quiet. Hector normally provided their dinner entertainment, regaling them with dirty jokes. I asked her if she smokes after sex. She turns to me and goes, “I don’t know, I never looked.” Instead, Hector ate sullenly and said nothing. After dinner he pulled La Mazière aside.

  “You sure know how to take the pachanga out of it, man.”

  La Mazière said he wasn’t sure what Hector meant.

  Pachanga was an attitude, Hector said. A revolutionary movement with pachanga was a lively movement, with a certain spirit—the spirit of fun. Killing Batistianos as a lesson for the men wasn’t what Hector would call fun.

  La Mazière replied that fun is in the eye of the beholder. And if they wanted to goof off, play stickball, forget about the goal of taking over the Cuban government, they should let him know, because he’d been under the impression that they were serious.

  “We are serious. But there was no need to kill that guy. What about the concept of prisoner of war?”

  Concept indeed, considering that Hector had neither captured nor been one. “By all means tell me,” La Mazière said, making no effort to disguise his contempt for Hector’s ignorance, “about prisoners of war. The concept, at least—”

  “Look, man, the father is extremely upset. He thought he was being asked to demonstrate last rites, as in, show the soldiers a hypothetical scenario.”

  La Mazière responded that last rites were last rites. Would the chaplain be happy to see prayer regarded as a hypot
hetical scenario—if I were sincere, I’d get on my knees and appeal to God, but I am not, and so this is a demonstration?

  Hector didn’t argue. La Mazière wasn’t sure if he’d convinced him, but he didn’t care. He probably had more sympathy for that unfortunate Rural Guardsman than all of the others in camp put together. He couldn’t explain this to Hector or anyone else who hadn’t graduated from indulgent and idiotic “concepts” to life itself, in its full spectrum of necessary horrors.

  Hector and Valerio no longer came to his tent for games of chess, and certain soldiers, in particular the boy who’d suggested they hold a trial for the Rural Guardsman, kept their distance as well. He’d been with the unit two months now, and an obvious schism was growing, between those ready for intensity and those ready for stickball.

  A week after the execution, after word got back to him about the incident, Raúl Castro sent their unit a letter of commendation. Raúl declared, as Valerio read aloud, that the future dream of a new society required not compromises, the distorted “fairness” of the old system, but new and severe measures. They were lucky to have on their side this Frenchman with impeccable military training. If he were willing, Raúl would name La Mazière their unit’s official tactical adviser. When Valerio finished reading, some of the soldiers looked down stoically. One of the boys who had vomited during the execution clapped robustly.

  His new advisory role uncorked a flow of memories, a mode of being in which La Mazière began to marinate, and happily. Remembering tricks he’d learned as a Waffen, which he shared with the soldiers.

  Tape your glasses to your face before you jump, La Mazière instructed, the basics of parachuting, to a squadron being sent on sorties to sabotage army garrisons and sugar mills.

  They will open a manhole cover, he explained. The light above you blinks red. When it stays red, drop into the black. Don’t think about it. Just look at the red light and drop.

  Don’t try to prevent yourself from falling when you land. Bend your knees and roll. If there is a pond near your landing site, wrap your chute around a rock and sink it.

  If you run out of water, suck on bullets.

  Always cook off grenades before lobbing them, so they can’t be lobbed back. No more than two seconds, he warned. And never, ever, throw them up stairwells.

  From the primitive conditions he’d encountered when he’d first arrived in January, the activities of La Mazière’s unit began to approximate something like modern warfare. In the late spring they finished building their own airstrip in the mountains, and by May they were receiving regular shipments of M-1 and carbine rifles, artillery, mortars, and ammunition—thousands of pounds of weapons whose sale La Mazière himself negotiated, before he had any plan to roll up his sleeves and train the men who’d be using them. With these shipments came proper machining tools, which resourceful Valerio and a team of helpers utilized to convert an enormous tractor into a tank. They welded on thick plates of steel and mounted every caliber of rifle they had, and, to La Mazière’s horror, a catapult, which would launch a single bowling ball they’d recovered from an abandoned American social club. The plates of steel were of mismatched sizes and shapes, the guns loose in their turret holds. Their contraption flopped along the steep, muddy road toward camp like a metal shack on wheels. A group of men tumbled from it, excitedly making mockingbird calls.

  “I am amused,” La Mazière said to them, “and even somewhat impressed. However, it is a clumsy thing. Terribly clumsy.”

  The men’s faces, all triumphant smiles as they’d dismounted, fell in disappointment.

  “I thought that you more than anyone,” Valerio said, “would applaud the project.”

  “It’s a living expression of the living creativeness of the proletariat!” another soldier protested.

  Others chimed in.

  “Who cares if it’s clumsy?”

  “Yeah, we’ll blow their asses up!”

  La Mazière was beginning to lose patience with the general disregard in camp for the importance of aesthetic as well as military control. He had suggested to Valerio that making swamp shoes out of reeds wasn’t, perhaps, a top priority, and this ridiculous “tank” is what Valerio made instead. More than once, he’d been forced to explain to Valerio that chess games were for rainy days, not every day. Here he was, summoning his old wartime fitness, his finesse, a French killing machine, and he was surrounded by men who argued with their hands but were reluctant to use those same hands to pull a simple grenade pin, preferring to strap on Valerio’s homemade swamp shoes and tromp around the cow lilies, shouting with glee through boqui toquis, as they called their two-way radios. He was not averse to the cult of nature, to grounding a political cause in the facticity of the earth. But the rebels’ rural habits were laziness and leisure in place of discipline. None was interested in midnight hiking, as the Germans at Wildflecken had been so fond of doing. None was game for a brisk, predawn swim in a cold mountain stream. They had little taste for discipline in itself and the transcendence it promised. They could not even clean and properly oil their weapons, and so much worse, they had no understanding of the lyrical qualities of violence, and avoided it as best they could. Twice now, Hector had asked La Mazière to “show them again” when they’d encountered prisoners who had to be dealt with, Hector claiming that the soldiers still had not quite perfected the technique, and that he didn’t want them to squander the meaning of the killing that had to be done, asking could La Mazière please go over once more how “the blade of popular justice” worked, and demonstrate once again how the act was properly carried out. The idea of someone making him, La Mazière, conduct others’ dirty work like a regular low-life hit man was, of course, unthinkable. They were merely too weak to do it themselves, and needed someone strong to do it for them.

  He retreated to his tarp and drew diagrams, thinking, scratching out his failures. He came back to them with a tank design that was far more elegant than their rattletrap. No catapult. No wobbly turret holds. Just one spare and tasteful flamethrower with two thousand pounds of pressure.

  “What shall we christen it?” he asked them.

  “The Queen!” Valerio shouted, and so it was.

  Watching them practice their maneuvers in the Queen, La Mazière contemplated how odd it was that in chess, the consecrated object, the king, on which the entire game hinged, was in fact all but useless, sheer vulnerability, an inert symbol, while the queen was the truly desired object, with powers that were leaps and bounds beyond what any other chess piece possessed. When did this curious reversal of terms take place? And why? And what did it mean? Valerio’s hand-carved coconut queens were obscene caricatures with lusty proportions. But this did not diminish their importance to the game, their innate dignity as instruments of victory. A queen whose maker had beleaguered her with huge breasts and protruding labia could still move in any direction, still glide over the board with thrilling velocity and ease en route to triumph.

  Raúl, leader of the Frank País Second Front covering all of northeastern Oriente, was their commander. But they’d seen little of him, until the tractor-tank was perfected and a plot hatched to roll it down into the American region and take gasoline, which they badly needed, and hostages, which they didn’t need, but might prove a brilliant publicity stunt. They would abduct nickel company men and sugar company men and bring them up to the rebel camp. Show them a good time, offer tours of the damage caused by Batista’s bombers, and win the Americans’ sympathy.

  This plan, though officially Raúl’s, had actually been hatched by an American—Raúl’s sidekick, the prodigal son of a United Fruit manager. The boy, accompanied by a small detachment, came to La Mazière’s encampment to go over the details. He was a brooding sort who bit his lip, with longish hair that hung into his eyes—perhaps meant to look like Raúl’s mop of hair, except that his was the white-blond of a Scandinavian. When La Mazière first heard about the scheme, he thought it likely to end in disaster, the rebels ambushed by the Rural Gua
rd, or accidentally getting one of their charges killed. But hearing the American boy’s ideas, he grew less skeptical. It wasn’t a bad plan. Actually rather clever, the way this kid—Comandante Stites was his name—proposed dividing one column into two, just at the foothills of the Sierra Cristal, half the men crossing the Levisa River and going around and into Preston to take sugar company employees, the other half descending from the nickel mine, where worker sympathy meant they had all the lookouts and cover they would need, and into Nicaro, to nab unarmed managers like tender chickens and escort them back to camp.

  La Mazière worked with Comandante Stites on rearguard maneuvers, offering what knowledge he had on offense and retreat. Both men would be at the rear of a rear line—La Mazière because he was too valuable to be risked, and Stites because it was his own clan on which a front guard would descend. The boy had wanted to lead the operation. Understandable. It was, after all, his creation. But best, La Mazière advised, to give orders invisibly. Luckily, he was able to convince Stites without saying out loud what he saw as a likely outcome, if this boy wound up face-to-face with his own people, his own father, who was the head of the sugarcane operation in Preston. The strategy of keeping him in the rear of the rear line was classic Mao, or maybe Mao by way of Sun Tzu. During peasant uprisings, Mao never sent PLA units to roll tanks over the people of their own prefecture. Instead, he sent them to other prefectures, where the faces and names of the people crushed beneath their tanks were unfamiliar. Separating the American comandante from his American captives was prudent, a way of maintaining the rebel image as an unknowable multitude—not a boy with hair in his eyes, who might be vulnerable to the last-minute bribe of a warm bed and a hot meal, a Jamaican nursemaid drawing his bath. La Mazière could all but see it: “Come on home, son.”