Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  An immigration services official arrived in the afternoon that second day, sent by the U.S. government to assist them. He collected their passports, would handle all their paperwork, and help them repatriate. The process would not be quick, and everyone was asked to be patient.

  Two days later they were summoned in alphabetical groups. A through L was the first group. They waited in line outside a Quonset hut. Genevieve and Giddle Allain were doing handstands and cartwheels. They both wore shorts under their dresses so they could practice without flashing their underwear. Val whispered to Everly that the Allain sisters were wearing her old shorts. “Mother must have given them a bag of stuff I didn’t want anymore.” Val thought it demeaned them, but it didn’t. The shorts were madras and they looked good on Genevieve and Giddle, both girls upside down, skirts over their heads, Giddle walking on her hands.

  People looked at their watches. It was after 8:00 A.M., and no one had come to open the hut. Finally an immigration services official arrived with three military policemen. They walked up to Hatch Allain and pulled him aside.

  No one could hear what they were saying, but everyone—A through L—could see what was happening. The policemen handcuffed Hatch. Then they walked him past all the other Americans, right past his own family. Hatch smiled and spoke to them. Maybe it was the only dignified thing to do, with everyone staring. He said to no one in particular that the little monkey might have had the right idea. And then the immigration official and the military police led him into the Quonset hut and the door was shut behind them.

  What was the right idea? Everly thought about it and thought about it, and finally it dawned on her that maybe Poncho had been trying to escape. To get someplace, into some other life, away from being Mrs. LaDue’s pet monkey. Like the Chinese railroad workers Everly had read about, who hung themselves from nooses to try to get back to China, as if suicide were a form of travel, like air travel or sea travel. She didn’t know where Poncho had been trying to go. Hatch would be going to prison.

  There was a lot of killing time at the guesthouses, people hoping to send telegrams and make calls. But the telegraph machine was intermittent and the phones were dead.

  Everly was sitting on the guesthouse porch when Mrs. Carrington returned with a letter. Everly asked if it was news of Mr. Carrington, and added that she hoped he was okay.

  Mrs. Carrington gave the oblique reply that Everly shouldn’t worry about Mr. Carrington, that he’d be fine, just fine. Then she went into the room she was sharing with Val, and returned with two photo albums that she set on the porch table in front of Everly.

  Everly figured it was memorabilia, like Stevie and her Duchess of Windsor scrapbook, Stevie and her Cuba scrapbook, with maps and restaurant menus and articles from Unifruitco, photos of all three Lederer girls at the Preston pool. Stevie had taken the Cuba scrapbook with her when she’d left for boarding school.

  “Go ahead, open it,” Mrs. Carrington said.

  They were black-and-white photographs of ports and other industrial sites, mounted on matte black paper, each photo labeled and dated in white pencil. Montevideo, 1942–43. Caracas, 1945–47. Sulaco, 1950. Page after page, hundreds of photos.

  “All the projects my husband worked on,” Mrs. Carrington said.

  Suddenly Everly envied this instinct to document life as it happened, and wished she’d documented hers. All the ports Mr. Carrington had helped to build, and he had proof. They had been forced to leave, and Everly had documented nothing of the past seven years. She could barely remember Oak Ridge, where she’d lived until she was eight. She only knew Nicaro, and she had nothing of it to show, the clothes on her back, the white purse that for no logical reason she had grabbed at the last minute before they were hustled into the mine. Inside it was the gold faucet handle K. C. Stites had given her from Mr. Stites’s Pullman car. Because Duffy was still upset about her box of coral, Everly gave her the faucet handle. A decade later, she wanted it back, but by that time it was lost. Duffy might have just thrown it away, not understanding what it was or that it was worth keeping. And isn’t that why you gave it to her, she thought, to transfer it to someone for whom it would have no value? But now I’ve changed my mind. They were all grown up by then. Why did Everly suddenly want it? As some sort of proof, though it seemed strange to want proof of affections she’d never been keen on requiting. K.C. had placed the faucet handle in her hand. In that moment she’d felt every moment of every afternoon she’d spent with Mrs. Stites, and the doubts that had traced each of the moments, the unpleasant feeling of being appreciated but not known, not known at all by these people who were too different from her. She’d thanked K.C. and put the faucet handle in her purse, but she had not wanted it. If Willy had given it to her it would have been different, but he never would have. Willy had danced with a broom like he was dancing with her, twirling the broom around, swaying with it from side to side and dipping it like it was a girl, but not just any girl, his hand supporting the small of her back, and the girl trusting him and leaning low. It was either more subtle than a gold faucet handle or more forward, maybe outrageously forward. Either way, it was all she was going to get. She hadn’t even been able to say good-bye to Willy. The servants in the navy barracks were locked in, for “security,” as the evacuation took place. Everyone was being pushed into a group, lumped with the rebels or the government or the Americans. She had to be with the Stiteses and the LaDues and the rest of them, as if they were her people, and separated from Willy and the Cubans, who were not her people.

  K.C. had kissed her on the cheek when he and his family left Guantánamo for Haiti. An awkward, dry kiss they both knew meant good-bye, and not the beginning of anything. Maybe she wanted his affection, but not to return it. Yet she sensed that by not returning it, it would dwindle. Everything did.

  “He’s probably one of those Bay of Pigs fanatics,” Stevie said when Everly wondered out loud what had become of K.C., two years after they’d left Cuba. “Totally conservative. You can’t even talk to those people. They won’t reason. They’re hysterical with greed.” Tico Leál had become one. Stevie ran into him at a party in New York City in early 1961. Stevie was a beatnik by then. She wore black turtlenecks and white lipstick and talked about exploitation and revolution, quoted Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon. She said Tico Leál pulled her into a bedroom and opened what looked like a violin case to show her his machine gun. “Some of us have a plan,” he’d said.

  Everly made her way through Mrs. Carrington’s album, port after port, aerial shots from so high up they looked like maps rather than photographs. When she was finished, Mrs. Carrington placed the second album in front of her, presented it as though there were a formal order, looking intently at Everly. She’s gauging my reaction to something, Everly thought, opening the second album. But what?

  A week after the evacuation they were in Miami, staying at a motel across from a Pickin’ Chicken, where they ate dinner at an outdoor table, under a sky the deep pink of women’s crème blush.

  Everly would be going to her grandmother’s in St. Louis. Marjorie and George and Duffy would stay with the other grandmother, across town. Neither had room for all of them, and thank goodness Stevie was at boarding school, her mother said, tuition paid by the company through the end of the year. Marjorie Lederer kept announcing that they were ruined in a manner so insistent that Everly began to wonder if there was a certain pleasure in insisting such a thing.

  They finished their Pickin’ Chicken and returned to the motel to watch the coin-operated television set mounted in the corner of their room. Fifty cents per hour, which Marjorie Lederer said was highway robbery, but they wanted to see the CBS special report on Cuba and their own evacuation. “The town of Palma Soriano has officially fallen under rebel control, according to Cuban news sources.” There was television footage of roadblocks and tanks, people cheering in the streets. Then an old Hollywood actor, the star of a film Everly had seen in Nicaro, waving from a silver sports coupe with gull-
wing doors. Cubans flowed around and past the exotic car as if he and it didn’t matter. The actor told reporters he’d helped rebels take the town, and for his efforts they were awarding him a special combat medal.

  Marjorie Lederer sat at the motel room desk, itemizing their belongings from memory, every last appliance and piece of furniture, for which she expected, she said, full compensation.

  “From whom?” George Lederer asked her.

  “Your employers. The U.S. government. Lito Gonzalez. National Lead.”

  “Dear, my employers stand to lose a hundred million dollars on their investment. And Lito Gonzalez ran us out of town, if you believe Hubert Mackey.”

  “No one was hurt in the evacuation of American citizens from the Nipe Bay area on the northeastern coast of Oriente Province,” a CBS reporter said. “Though one woman, apparently overcome with sadness at being forced from her home, needed medical assistance.”

  “That’s not why,” Duffy said. “It’s because Poncho cracked his coconut! He cracked his coconut!”

  Everly did as Mrs. Carrington instructed and opened the second of the two photo albums.

  The first image was of a woman posing against a rock, wearing a halter shirt and short shorts, Cuban, with hair that looked like it had been ironed flat to tame its curls.

  “She’s pretty,” Everly ventured, unsure what she was supposed to say.

  “They’re all pretty, dear.”

  Everly turned the page. Another woman, in a sheer blouse and tight skirt, also Cuban, posed against what looked like the very same rock. The next page, another, same rock. The next page, yet another, every single one of them smiling like she was smiling for a lover. “We both know I’m sexy to you.”

  “He said he wanted the pictures for when he was old and depressed,” Mrs. Carrington said. “To remind himself of the good times he’s had.”

  Her husband’s secret catalog of mistresses. Mrs. Carrington seemed strangely proud of the photographs, as if they belonged not to Tip Carrington but to her.

  “My husband loved life,” Mrs. Carrington said, as though he were no longer living.

  My husband loved life. And she had proof.

  25

  They were riding into United Fruit territory, a convoy of jeeps and cars and buses, some forty rebels comprising a handful of units that had converged in the foothills of the Sierra Cristal, outside the city of Holguín. La Mazière was a hero, and there was a designated spot for him in one of the open jeeps.

  Campesinos along the road gave the V for victory sign, shouting “Mau Mau! Mau Mau!,” a term that had recently become popular, an allusion to Kenyans fighting to drive out colonial British rule—rebels who, like the Cubans, were shaggy and unkempt. They waved back from the jeeps as they rolled down the rutted road, La Mazière a Mau Mau, too, thanks to a shortage of razors in the mountains.

  Some of the younger men fired their guns into the air. You waste those bullets now, La Mazière thought, but you’ll want them later, for the cascade of reprisals.

  They descended the foothills of the Sierra Cristal and reached Birán in the early afternoon, stopping for a brief visit at the Castro hacienda. Señora Castro appeared on the porch in a black lace mantilla and cat-eye glasses and clutched Fidel like a lover she had believed she’d lost forever. La Mazière sat in the shade of a grove of giant algarroba trees with Hector and Valerio, laughing as a younger rebel from their troop entertained them by chasing a nervous rooster across the lawn. Several maids and a butler came out of the house, the butler outfitted like the maître d’ at Maxim’s, in a crisp white jacket and bow tie, white gloves, a starched tea towel folded perfectly over his arm. The maids and the butler in his formal attire served cane juice from frosted-glass pitchers, wonderfully cool and sweet. La Mazière and the others sipped their cane juice, waiting for Fidel and his mother to finish their brief and Oedipal embrace.

  The procession continued toward Preston, for a local-boys-make-good celebration. They detoured through the cane cutters’ slum on the outskirts of the town, a miserable-looking place with an open sewer running along a dense collection of primitive palm-leaf huts, hundreds and hundreds of them, possibly thousands. People flooded out of the huts and surrounded them. Women cried and hugged husbands who’d been away fighting in the mountains. Barefoot children and toddlers in raggy diapers climbed over the tanks, boys and girls putting on the armbands that rebels flung from the jeeps. Someone even fitted one around a newborn baby’s head, M-26 in red and black banding its young and tender skull.

  They parked the vehicles in the center of town, in the midst of what seemed to La Mazière a rather impressive colonial enclave. On their way to Preston, they had circled through Nicaro, the other now-empty American community in the region. It looked like a caricature of middle-class values, a town through which a toy train snakes, absurdly tidy, though its white houses were stained a faint pink. At first La Mazière suspected it might have been due to the tint of his eyeglasses, but then he realized that the entire town was coated in a fine reddish grit. Beyond the town, a workers’ slum. But the Nicaro slum, unlike Preston’s, had been burned to the ground, a remnant of the Rural Guard’s campaign of terror, which had worked against them and made every Cuban in the region a rebel sympathizer.

  Preston was far more obvious and immodest than Nicaro in its wealth. The homes were enormous, with wraparound porches shuttered in varnished louvers, plantation estates that he guessed were modeled on those in the American South. The gardens of each enormous home were showcases of tropical foliage, the teeming verdure of Oriente crimped and strangled into picturesque mise-en-scène. Beyond one of the avenues a flawless green carpet rolled into the distance: a golf course, and adjacent to the golf course, polo fields.

  Fidel gave a speech on the main plaza, more angered and moving and animated than any of the speeches the commander had delivered over Radio Rebelde, to which La Mazière’s unit had listened or half listened while eating their nightly mess-tin ration of rice, bananas, or horse meat.

  The three men who remained from the town’s Rural Guard station stood uncomfortably to the right of Castro’s retinue while the commander spoke. As surprised as anyone that Batista had fled, they were now abandoned to their fate. Castro had offered them amnesty if they gave up their guns, and what choice did they have? They stood, abject, stripped of their weapons, feigning enthusiasm for the transfer of power, trapped in an awkward fact of civil war: that the enemies often have no choice but to remain, either to be integrated, punished, or disposed of. La Mazière himself had avoided such a fate by enlisting in the Waffen, departing Paris as Germans and collaborators lined up to board transport vehicles fleeing east, to Sigmaringen. As he was driving out of town he’d seen the author Céline waiting in one of those lines, hurriedly stuffing his cat into a cardboard carrier.

  They were gathered in the heart of imperialismo, Castro announced to the assembled rebels. Castro pointed to a set of offices, three-story buildings painted a mustard yellow. “La United,” he said, aiming an accusatory finger at the buildings, as if the name alone were an indictment.

  This town, Castro said, was the location of his own childhood dreams, this very place where they were gathered. Off-limits and American, it was the site where his imagination had been ignited, and roamed. Freely, he said, but in the freedom of dreams. The town of Preston was make-believe in its distance from his life just a few kilometers away, in Birán, make-believe in its luminosity, its impossibility. But real in its control, its ownership of everything and everyone.

  “Off-limits and American,” he repeated. “But of course, as many of you know, we Cubans were invited to cut the cane.”

  There was laughter.

  “Invited to lose an arm feeding the crushers at the mill. Invited, most graciously, to be fleeced by the company store, whose prices were unspeakable exploitation, invited into a modern and more efficient version of slave labor. But you and I were not allowed beyond those gates over there,” he pointed, “where t
he managers lived. ‘La Avenida,’ with, take note, the definite article. The avenue, but, of course, only for some. You could not walk down it. You were not allowed to swim in the company pool, go to the company club, use the company’s beaches. You could not fish in their bay, Saetía, or go to school with their children, or date their daughters, or God forbid, should you get sick, be treated at their hospital. You could not own your home, which you yourself had built, own your own plot of land, which you worked with your own shovel, your pick, your hoe.”

  He said that he’d spent his boyhood gazing from beyond the scrolled iron gates that enclosed La Avenida, gazing, he said, at a mirage overlaid with black arabesques, the wrought-iron bars of a fence through which he’d looked. A small boy, wanting only to glimpse a magical place.

  That was all he’d wanted as a young boy, and it was all he’d been given.

  “There is another man,” Castro said, “whose destiny was shaped by La United: Fulgencio Batista.”

  People booed and hissed.

  “Let me make myself clear. Batista and I,” Castro said, “are opposites. We both gazed through the fence, he in Banes, myself here. I grew up to hate imperialists. He grew up to love them, and learned to ingratiate himself on their terms. Became president and accepted their bribes, no less humiliated than a cane cutter! We are opposites. My father was a landowner. Batista’s father was a guajiro who squatted on company property. Batista was born in a dirt shack, with nothing, like the men who worked my father’s land. Born in a dirt shack. His destiny was to humiliate himself for the American landowner. Perhaps a man cannot change his destiny. Perhaps he has no choice. My own destiny was to evict the American landowner—”

  There was cheering and applause and shouting.