Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  Her husband was scooping up the remains of her drink, which was now just the base of a glass surrounded by broken shards.

  “The rebels have the phosphorus,” he said, “and we’ve got the ammonia.”

  “But what the hell does it matter?”

  “Because phosphorus is a weapon. The rebels are threatening to drop it from airplanes, to start fires. But it’s just a threat, to get our attention. You know all about threats. Don’t you, dear.”

  He set the broken glass on the bar, gesturing to the bartender to make her a new one. “And ammonia is a target. Those tanks near the bay? They’d explode—I mean hypothetically. It’s a scare tactic. Nothing is going to happen. Except that some of us will have hangovers tomorrow.”

  “All problems have a solution,” the faith healer announced. “We all have a right to succeed in business, in study, in sports, in gambling, in love.”

  There were new laws. Palm readers, hypnotists, and self-appointed gurus were convicted. Also, vendors who sold magic powders, aphrodisiacs, and remedies by mail. Batista banned broadcasts on divination and the interpretation of dreams, on anything that stimulated beliefs opposed to civilization. Only the lottery numbers were okay.

  Mrs. Billings had gone to the powder room. She looked at herself in the large mirror above the washbasins.

  Sometimes you just have to give in, she knew. She didn’t want to live in a midwestern shithole. What is more beautiful than Oriente? the Americans all said. What air is more tender? What flowers more brilliant and exotic? What company parties more fun and carefree? What life is better than theirs? “If you can just hang on, this is all going to blow over,” the men said to their wives, as if they’d rehearsed these lines. What did she know about what would and would not blow over?

  There was plenty of liquor at the Pan-American Club. There was caviar and cream cheese on crackers, with a squeeze of fresh limone—delicious, although she never figured out why the Cubans called them that, since they were not lemons but limes. There were deviled eggs and vol-au-vents. Fetching, tiny electric lights in pink, green, and white, strung along the gleaming mahogany bar. Just for them, their club, their holiday. And she was in a new gown, chiffon, her favorite fabric, that wonderful rustling material that made her want to go home and pretend her husband still—

  A thunderous rip of pops erupted from somewhere inside. The chandeliers swung in the rooms where the ceilings hadn’t vaulted, and then sagged, threatening to collapse. Mrs. Billings, Mrs. Mackey, and the Carrington twin, the one who hadn’t run off with the boxing coach, were all in the powder room when the explosion occurred. Better accustomed to their own club back in Nicaro, all three women reeled straight into the enormous mirrors that were mounted on the walls of the powder room lounge. Panicked and confused, they mistook the silvered glass for open space (Euclid still applied, if not to history, at least to the layout of the Pan-American Club).

  The mirrors crashed to the floor. The women ambled aimlessly, sliced up, blood batiking their faces. “It’s broken,” the Carrington twin said, holding her hands over her nose, which flumed garnet down her chin.

  Mrs. Billings wandered into the foyer, glass crunching under her heels. There was music in her head, jangly and instrumental, with a high-pitched and chimey aftertrace. Music you’d pump out of a hand-crank organ, she thought, but pictured no monkey. The monkeys here didn’t work—they hung from their cages, blinking at you with their moist, human eyes. The music was getting louder, more high-pitched around the edges. She felt a hand on her arm: her husband’s. But she couldn’t see him. Blood flooded her vision. And she couldn’t hear him, on account of that crazy music.

  She said, “Can someone please turn that down? Can someone please turn that down?”

  She said it as loud as she could, but the music drowned her out.

  21

  Radio Clavelito Independiente 710 AM

  December 3, 1958, 10:00 P.M.

  Good evening, brothers and sisters.

  I have not abandoned you. In fact, the tragic actions of the state have only made me stronger.

  They can shut down CMQ, but not Clavelito. The radio band is large. I will keep moving. Discontinued, though only temporarily, are my extrasensory telephones, no longer purchasable by mail order. We hope to make them available again soon. We are aware of the waiting list, and more importantly the need for this vital equipment. But on this issue the state has legislated, and established prohibitive fines.

  Should I be fined for offering, at long last, a use of technology that isn’t a lazy convenience? Would you rather have a wafflemaker? That’s what the state would prefer. That you spend your money on waffle-makers.

  Clavelito has not abandoned you. This important work, supplying faith where there is little, shall continue. Partly thanks to the support of you, my listeners, who understand what the state does not, that the true condition of radio has only one equivalence: not “imaginary” participation, but the rain outside your window.

  Brothers and sisters, collect this rain.

  22

  The dance at the Pan-American Club was not a good-bye fete, although some people later thought of it that way.

  It was just a Saturday night party—Daddy’s idea. I think Daddy wanted to prove that everything was business as usual, despite the rebels and some of the disturbances we’d experienced. Few people were giving up and leaving. We were staying, of course. The LaDues, I know, were staying—Mr. LaDue was like that, an old workhorse, loyal to Daddy no matter what. The Allains were staying, although they didn’t have the same options as the rest of us.

  There was only one twin at the club that night. The other had run off with Luís Galindez. Those sisters always came together to Preston, dressed alike, a thick collusion between them. Seeing just the one gave me this feeling that things might be beginning to unravel. It was Nicaro I thought was unraveling—not Preston. Nicaro was closer to the rebel encampments, and everything there was more complicated because of Gonzalez. We were an American town, and foreign-owned property in a time like that becomes a safe haven. Nicaro should have been a safe haven as well, but they had a Cuban investor, so it wasn’t purely American-owned. There were rumors that Gonzalez was using the nickel mine as collateral, playing Castro off against Batista and cutting deals with both sides. People felt that Gonzalez was up to something, but they didn’t know what.

  I’m not sure why I didn’t think Preston was unraveling. Del had been gone for almost a year, and running off to fight with Cuban rebels is a lot more serious than Pamela Carrington falling in love with a boxing coach. The rebels had blocked the main road down to Mayarí. We still had our social life—you could yacht over to Nicaro or Saetía anytime you wanted. Take a company plane to Miami. But if you wanted to go anywhere south or west or east of us, meaning to the rest of the island, you were out of luck. Castro had a lot of power by that point. He could stop our operations anytime he wanted. He was demanding that we pay fifteen cents on every bag of sugar, and yet we couldn’t process the cane to pay him. We had no gasoline to run the mill, no oil to run the railroad. Much of the track was destroyed, making it impossible to get the cane to the mill. And half the blacks we needed to cut it were gone. The rebels were shutting off our water supply intermittently, to demonstrate that they could. They were threatening to burn down every last acre of sugarcane on the island. They could have done it. They had planes and their own airstrips in the mountains, and they’d been starting fires all over the island by dropping payloads of phosphorus-filled Ping-Pong balls from airplanes. Daddy kept telling everyone to be patient. He said gasoline was on its way, oil was on its way, and he was negotiating a deal that would work in our favor. The rail tracks were being repaired. We’d have a cutting season, he said. It would simply start a bit late, a late but fantastically profitable cutting season. If we gave up, he reminded people, we’d have no cutting season.

  Maybe he was right. From the television news, life in Havana seemed fairly normal, the first lad
y preparing for her annual holiday gift giveaway on the palace lawn, the mayor of New York City and his family vacationing with the du Ponts in Varadero, and ads for a Christmas spectacular at the Cabaret Tokio. We weren’t going to visit the Havelins, with the situation in Preston so precarious, but the Havelins wouldn’t be in Havana anyhow. A month earlier, in November, Batista had appointed Deke Havelin Cuban ambassador to Brazil. There were photos of the Havelins in the Havana Post, dressed to the nines, flying off to São Paulo. Deke was quoted, saying how proud he was to represent Cuba and so forth—his party toast all over again, wiping a tear from his eye. I’m not sure how much Spanish Deke even spoke, much less a word of Portuguese.

  That day of the party there were Cuban stevedores unloading a ship on the Preston dock wearing nothing but underwear and their shoes. You never saw any Cuban wearing shorts, much less their underwear in public, but that’s how tight security had gotten. A shipment had come from England delivering weapons for Batista’s Rural Guard, and they didn’t want any funny business. “Goodness,” Mother said, and turned away, embarrassed, as she and I walked past the dock. We were on our way to pick up some medicine for Panda at the almacén. That’s how Mother was, always tending to people’s needs. Panda was sick. Mother said she heard that Dr. Romero suspected tuberculosis. Mother put the medicine on our account, and I took it down to the Allain place. They had Panda in the living room, lying on a couch under a pile of blankets, pale and coughing, with dark pouches under her eyes. Mars took the medicine and thanked me. She said Dr. Romero had just been to check on Panda. He’d said that Panda needed to be under the care of someone who specialized in respiratory illnesses, and they should get her to a hospital in Miami as soon as possible. I doubt that Dr. Romero understood the situation. Mars asked me about hospitals in Santiago. It would have been difficult to get to Santiago, I told her, because of the roadblocks.

  Rudy went to speak with Daddy at his office later that day. Daddy came home and told us there wasn’t much he could do. “Makes you realize,” he said, “how well the company takes care of its own. We sure as hell don’t judge people on whatever happened in the deep past. Hold it against a man because there’s a little smudge on his dossier, a bit of shoe polish.” He was going to do what he could to get both Allain families transferred to an operation in Central America, maybe Tegucigalpa. Mother said why not have Mars take Panda to Miami? She didn’t commit any crimes. Daddy said they were all wanted now, for harboring a fugitive. I understand Daddy’s point about the shoe polish smudge, people being forgiven and allowed to start over. But in Hatch’s case it wasn’t such a minor smudge. A lot of people in Preston were under the impression he’d killed a black man, just some worker on a Louisiana cane plantation. The fellow not only wasn’t black, he was a fed—an ATF agent. Hatch apparently had an argument with this guy, a bootlegging investigator. Ironically, they were at a bar, drinking. There was some kind of dispute that escalated into a brawl, and Hatch ended up beating the guy to death.

  Daddy always felt that the employees couldn’t really relax at parties so long as the boss was looking over their shoulder. It was his custom to go to the club, spin Mother around the dance floor a turn or two, and then leave so everyone could enjoy themselves. I decided to make it a short evening as well. I’d gone to the party hoping to speak with Everly Lederer, but the Lederers hadn’t come. For months now I’d had this feeling that something had been there between me and Everly all along, and that all we had to do was call it out. I guess it was foolish and romantic, this idea that she’d been a favorite of Mother’s, and that we’d known each other since the Lederers had first arrived, when I was nine and she was eight, and that there was something special in trusting what seemed fated. I hadn’t seen her much all fall, ever since my fourteenth birthday, in June, when I’d given her the keepsake. I figured she was thinking about things and would eventually come around. When she didn’t show up at the club that night, it crossed my mind that maybe she was dating someone in Nicaro. “Who would want to date Everly Lederer?” Curtis had said when I wondered out loud one day if she had a boyfriend. “She’s a gawky tomboy, walks around with that spaced-out look like she’s focusing on something invisible about two feet in front of her face.” The spaced-out look had grown on me. If Tee-Tee Allain’s face was a shield against the world, shutting off any speculation as to who she was or what she cared about, Everly’s funny look was not intentional, as if she was unaware she had any look at all. Lost in thought, a naked look. Maybe everyone has that look, but they know to cover it. Hearing Curtis’s comment, I’d become convinced it was the right thing. Who would want to date her? Only me, it seemed.

  While Daddy took Mother out for a quick spin on the floor, I sat at the bar next to Mr. LaDue, who was entertaining some of us with stories about being up in the mountains with the rebels. Someone asked him what he thought had happened to Carrington. Mr. LaDue said poor Carrington had been sacked out with a migraine the whole time they were up there. Maybe he was wandering around in the woods, Mr. LaDue said, ill and confused.

  Mother, Daddy, and I were walking toward home, about to turn onto La Avenida. It was a very hot night, as humid as it gets in Oriente. A dense, rhythmic buzz of insects surrounded us. We had flowers in eastern Cuba that bloomed at night, and there was a heavy fragrance in the air as we walked, made more intense by the heat. Mother breathed in and said the butterfly jasmine was opening, and how gorgeous, that smell—

  Boom! we heard. Another boom. And then another. And then people screaming.

  Bombs detonated in our social club. It was a rude awakening, even if no one was hurt too badly. They’d been planted in a couple of rooms that weren’t being used, but also under the dance floor. Miraculously, the bombs detonated while everyone was taking a break, sitting down to cool off because of the humidity, or at the bar getting a refresher. A few people were cut up. Val Carrington broke her nose, rammed right into the wall of the women’s bathroom. But there were no serious injuries.

  What else would blow up? Everyone was in a panic. Daddy called the consul general in Santiago. He’d secured the release of our kidnapped employees, proving himself to be a lot more reliable than Ambassador Smith. The consul general said he’d been told they were having problems over in Nicaro as well. I don’t think he gave too many details. All we knew was that Nicaro was under attack—we assumed rebel attack. We didn’t know until later that the U.S. Navy was sending a rescue ship up the coast from Guantánamo. Because of the bombings, and the situation in Nicaro, which the consul general said could escalate, there would be a mandatory evacuation of all Americans around Nipe Bay.

  Daddy said chances were the U.S. government was panicking for no reason, and we’d evacuate and then come back to Preston and life would settle down. We didn’t have time to pack much, grabbed a few things and stuffed them in suitcases. It was 10:00 P.M., and we got on the rescue ship at four the following morning. Daddy made phone calls and sent his secretary, Mr. Suarez, and a few other guys around to tell people to be ready to leave. Daddy tried to get through to Nicaro, but their switchboard was down. The people who’d been in the club were taken to the Preston hospital, stitched up, and treated. The Nicaro folks among them would have to be evacuated as they were. Val Carrington had two black eyes, an ice pack held to her nose. Mrs. Billings’s head was wrapped in surgical gauze. She was wearing a fancy getup, a long gown with a matching capelet, with blood crusted into her hair and over her ear. She seemed dazed, like she’d really had her bell rung, and Mother took special care to try to calm her down after we got on the ship.

  Hatch came up to our house while we were packing. He told Daddy that he and Rudy and the families would stay and look after things. Daddy reminded him that the evacuation was mandatory and said that navy officers would be clearing the town.

  “But they’re taking everyone to Guantánamo, sir,” Hatch said. “I’m not going to Guantánamo.”

  Daddy had just been on the phone again with the consul general and had
a better idea of what was happening. He told Hatch that Nicaro was being strafed by Cuban military bombers and that the rebels had moved into town and were firing back. There was a battle going on right in Nicaro, and the American families there were in serious danger. Later we found out there were no rebels in Nicaro. Only Batista’s bombers, strafing the Americans. The mistake was no accident. It was a situation that Lito Gonzalez had carefully arranged. He called in the attack, claiming the rebels had occupied the town and that all the Americans were safely inside the mine. He didn’t care about their lives. He knew the Americans would be evacuated, and he planned to take over the nickel operation.

  “This is chaos,” Daddy said, “and you can’t stay, Hatch.”

  I think it was mostly because of Panda that the Allains decided to risk it and get on the ship with the rest of us.

  23

  Charmaine Mackey had rehearsed the conversation so many times in her mind that having it for real would not seem so radical, or risky, or outrageous.

  She would go to his home, knock on the door, announce herself to the butler, and ask to speak to Mr. Gonzalez.

  Hubert had left for the shindig at the Preston club without her. As they had gotten dressed for the party, she’d mentioned not feeling well, and Hubert said angrily that she was never feeling well, and why didn’t she just stay home. She hadn’t argued with him. He’d sighed heavily, knotted his tie, and put on his coat and wristwatch, his movements angry and deliberate, as if he were punishing her, when in fact she wanted to stay home. He patted her on the shoulder as he left, to indicate a breath of forgiveness in the stern policy of leaving her behind.