Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  It was 1999. They stayed at the Rancho Club Motel in Santiago, where their father had attended Raúl Castro and Vilma Espín’s wedding reception a month after the revolution. “I promised I would attend, and I am keeping my word,” he’d told Marjorie Lederer, though of course he was thrilled to attend. He returned from Cuba ecstatic, humming Danzón melodies. A marvelous, earthy affair, he said. He and Mr. Billings flew down together, George Lederer toting a Bundt cake pan despite his doubts that it was an appropriate wedding gift for revolutionaries. “It’s cast aluminum,” Marjorie Lederer said. “It’s a very good Bundt cake pan.” Everly was given the exact same model of cake pan when she married. She and Raúl shared kitchen equipment, a pan she never used and was sure he hadn’t, either.

  “Do you know a Willy Bloussé?” she asked everyone she spoke to their first day in Nicaro. The Cubans on the old manager’s row were mostly plant technicians. They made it quickly apparent they didn’t associate with Haitians, people who’d been servants under the old regime, so she asked only Haitian men.

  Their second day, as the sisters sat on the veranda of their old house passing around photographs with its new occupants, a man came walking up the road and stopped in front. She should have known from his slow, rhythmic saunter that it was Willy, wearing a navy blue newsboy cap like he’d always worn.

  “When they told me ‘someone named Everly Lederer is in town,’” he said, “I didn’t believe it. It was like a dream.”

  The house of Willy and his wife, Malvina, was tidy, meticulously decorated with Malvina’s fake flowers and Haitian dolls. But they had no telephone. Their electricity was out. Their toilet was in a dark corner, separated from the rest of the house by a plastic curtain. And they cooked on an alcohol burner out back behind the kitchen, under palm thatches. Race still mattered in Nicaro. Many other things were the same. The shampoo fragrance of ripe guavas, and enormous black butterflies like airborne swatches of scalloped velvet. The ammonia tanks next to the ice factory on the bay. Their club, Las Palmas, modernized and anyone could go there now, though they served only beer, and no one had money to buy it. The sisters went. Their beer was served in sherbet glasses. Why not? Everly thought, sipping her flat beer.

  The flamboyán Willy had carefully tended was taller than their old house. Its vermilion petals spilled over the roof, partly caved in and covered with a frayed tarp. Willy laughed about the roof. He repaired his own with homemade tar and it didn’t leak. Willy planted vegetables, machined parts to fix his refrigerator, welded his own hand-operated cane crusher and mounted it on a tree in his backyard. He offered them each a cup of cool, sweet guarapo. Willy was prepared for the future.

  Pamela and Luís Galindez lived just up the street, in Levisa. Pamela was trapped in the past. “When you leave, honk the Klaxon!” she said. “Everyone will know I had visitors who came in a car.” She wanted Everly to send her clothes from Burdine’s in Miami, but clothing from 1958. “A cardigan with the shiny things—the sequins,” she said in rusty English, a language she hadn’t used in forty years. “And Capezios—or those moccasins with, what are they called, the seeds sewn onto them.” The last thing she said when they left: “Everly, don’t forget the slippers with the seeds! Size eight—”

  Tip Carrington lived in Mr. Mackey’s old house. He was retired, but for many years he’d been administrador of the nickel operation, a hero who figured out how to run the plant when they nationalized, famous all over Cuba, a “personaje” honored by Fidel, given a house and a decent pension. A happy old man, slightly crazy, wandering shirtless in his nickel company hard hat. Baby pigs pattered around on the house’s tiled floors, the same cream and blue tiles as the Lederers’ old house, the same pink and black bordello bathroom. His wife, a mulatta from the countryside, was thirty years younger. She made rum in a still on the back porch, and the two of them drank it on the front porch. She drove her very own state-awarded automobile, which upset the neighbors greatly. “She lets delivery people look up her skirt, to get extra loaves of bread,” they said. “She doesn’t wear underwear.”

  Red dust was everywhere, so fine it was like a gas, under their fingernails, in the seams of their clothes, in the weave of paper money, a glaucous powder that coated their skin. There was more red dust than she remembered, but underneath the dust was the same jungle-green, a profusion of it. The sea as well looked green, under heavy-lidded clouds. Had it always been that color, or had its colors changed? The sea is a multitude, a roar of voices. And then again a silence, an absence of voices. The green water in Levisa Bay lapped softly, making almost no sound. In the crash of foamy waves that pounded the shores of Guernsey, the exiled author decoded messages from Dante, Marat, and Molière. Don’t forget the slippers with the seeds.

  Why is the water green? she wondered. Perhaps it had something to do with algae, or minerals, or light. The Red Sea wasn’t red, but its surface, reflecting the mountains beyond it, sometimes appeared red. And whether it means red or something else—perhaps “not mirrorlike” or “very opaque”—the sea in the Odyssey is wine dark. It can be mirrorlike, silver as a mirror’s surface, or black as its tain. Or blue. Like an eye, it both reflects and refracts the sky at which it gazes.