The Lonely Crossing of Juan Cabrera

by J. Joaquin Fraxedas

  Chapter Thirteen

  Alberto looked over his shoulder out the rear window of the little Cessna. Behind him, Key West had disappeared over the horizon, and it occurred to him, in a sensible moment, that this search was preposterous. In thirty years of looking he had never found anyone. Not a single raft person. But he kept looking every day. Sometimes casually as he flew along the coast doing S-turns with a student and other times with great earnestness, as he was doing now.

  Every few months he would hear through the grapevine that some people had left on a raft or in a small boat from Tarara or Cojímar or Santa Cruz del Norte or some other beach along the north coast. Then a sort of insanity would come over him and he would start looking for them as though he were the one person in the world who was destined to find them. Those times he would get in an airplane and head south, toward the place from which he heard they had left, and he would search and search and search, sometimes for days, flying over the Gulf Stream, just above the crests of the waves.

  And every time he went on one of these frantic searches he told himself it was absurd—usually around now, when he was halfway between Florida and Cuba. And it was almost always in the same manner, like a silly routine that had to be played out. He would look out the rear window and see nothing but water. Then he would fly around in circles for a while and tell himself, This is ridiculous, this is crazy. I never find anyone. I am wasting expensive fuel. I should head back. What are they to me, anyway? I don’t even know their names. And in any event, there are people who are paid to do this, who know how to do it professionally. I do not know how to do it, that is why I never find anyone.

  Then, after three or four circles, he would pick up his course again and head toward the beach he heard they had left from. If it was Santa Cruz del Norte, his course from Key West would be almost directly south. If it was one of the other beaches closer to Havana, like Cojímar or Guanabo, his course would be more westward.

  Right now he was flying in circles and he figured he was about forty miles south of Key West, close to the heart of the Gulf Stream, where the flow of the current is strongest. Soon he would be heading southward again, and in a few minutes he would see Cuba. Then he would turn to the northeast and follow the Gulf Stream back toward the Florida Keys.

  Thirty years looking and not finding, he thought. And then you hear all these strange stories. Some of them could not be true, but some of the strangest were, and he knew that the one that he was remembering now was true because he had talked to the man and he had seen the wallet and the little red flag with his own eyes and because you could not invent so much pain.

  The man had escaped on a raft made of plywood and inner tubes. The man’s brother had planned to come with him but had lost his nerve at the last minute. So there, by the shore, the man said to his brother, “You are a gallina, a chicken. You don’t have any cojones.” The man was trying to shame his brother into changing his mind, not really trying to insult him. The man’s brother said nothing and just helped him get off, pushing him a little way into the water. And as the man drifted off, his brother waved goodbye slowly, with great sadness.

  A year later this same man is working at the Flamingo Hotel in Miami Beach and he is out there picking up trash on the beach in the cool grayness before the sun rises and he sees an inner-tube raft that has come up on the sand with the early tide. And in a plastic bag tied to the raft he finds his brother’s wallet and a little red flag. The man runs up and down the beach calling his brother’s name and later he calls Immigration and the Coast Guard and everyone he can think of, and of course he never finds his brother. Then one afternoon in a bar in Key Largo the man comes up to Alberto, without ever having met him, and tells him his story because someone at the bar points out Alberto and tells the man that Alberto is “the pilot who’s always looking for raft people.” And even though in his mind the man knows his brother is dead, his heart refuses to believe it, and when he finishes his story the man’s eyes are brimming with tears and he tells Alberto that to this day he still looks for his brother when he is walking down the street, and sometimes when he goes into a timbiriche, a little hole-in-the-wall café in Miami, his heart leaps when he sees the back of a man’s head that reminds him of his brother, or someone making a gesture like his brother used to make.

  Stories like this and hundreds of others Alberto had heard over the years were the reason he kept looking. The fact that these stories (and others no one has heard) kept playing themselves out every day—every day for thirty years!—were sufficient reason to keep looking, he told himself. Were they not justification enough?

  Now, very low on the horizon, Alberto saw a hint of grayness and he knew that it was the top of a hill and that soon, if he kept his heading, he would see the thin green coastline of Cuba rising from the sea. But he figured he had come close enough, and turned away to the northeast.

  There was no sense in tempting them, even if he was flying so low that he was sure no radar would pick him up. Still, it was better to be careful and not tempt them unnecessarily, even though he knew that he was over international waters and that they were in no mood to create an incident with the United States by shooting down an unarmed Cessna. Not the way things had been going for them lately. Thirty years ago it would have been a different story. He would have been cockier, much cockier. And they would have been cockier. But that was thirty years ago. Now, at sixty, after all he had been through, Alberto did not want to confront a MiG or, rather, to become a victim of one.

  The sun was lower in the west, and the Gulf Stream had taken on the colors of the late afternoon. Behind him the water was melted gold. To the east, the slant of the light had given the current a dark greenish tint that in the distance turned to a deep, melancholy violet. But visibility was still good and there was a strong wind blowing from the east that raised whitecaps and kept away the haze.

  It will take longer with this headwind, he thought. But if I push, I can make it to Key Largo while it is still light. Pushing it faster will use more fuel, that’s true, but I can still make it to Key Largo and search a little around the upper Keys while there’s light. I’ll look around as long I have light, and if I have to, if I’m really low, he thought, I’ll put her down at Ocean Reef Club. They won’t like it, being private and all, but if I have to, I’ll put down at Ocean Reef.

  Earlier Alberto had decided that he would just head back to Marathon and leave the search around the upper Keys for the morning, but now in the sad light of the afternoon he felt a strange urgency, a powerful need, to use every last ray of light to search for these people. And he knew that he would search well into the twilight because, without anyone demanding it or expecting it or even knowing that he was doing it, he felt that it was the right thing to do. And to feel—without doubt—that you are doing the right thing at any given moment is a rare thing, or at least it was for him, he thought. Maybe other people feel differently. Maybe other people feel that they are doing the right thing all the time as they go about their lives doing everyday things that are expected of them. But he usually started his days with a vague uneasiness, a lingering feeling that he should be opening his eyes in some other place, doing some other thing. So he savored this rare feeling of peace and communion with the world and let it dwell comfortably in him so it would settle undisturbed in his memory and come back to him later.

  He had felt this same way twenty-nine years ago when he flew a B-26 over the bright waters of the Caribbean on his way to Playa Girón during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and since then (until today) he had never been able to bring back the sensation fully. He could remember it but not fully bring it back. The same way you can remember having been in love and everything surrounding the experience, the places you went, the things you did, everything you said. But not the experience itself. Or the colors. Each love has its own colors that spill over the trees, across the sky, and beyond the horizon into the deepest recesses of the universe, touching every planet, painting every star. And t
hose colors can never be brought back, he thought.

  The feeling Alberto had now was like touching something far beyond the everyday, like being caressed by a peaceful and eternal thing. There is no word in Spanish for that feeling, and Alberto did not think there was an English word for it either. But he could not be sure. He had not fully mastered the English language. So he tried hard to think of an English word for it.

  Then he thought about the early days in exile. October 1960. Recruited by the CIA a week after landing in Miami. They were planning a mysterious large-scale operation against Castro, and experienced Cuban exile pilots were in great demand. No one told him the operation was large-scale. In fact, no one told him much of anything at all, not even that the people who recruited him were with the Compañía, the Company, which is what Cubans call the Central Intelligence Agency because the abbreviation Cia. is the Spanish equivalent of Inc.

  But it was obvious enough. The word was out on the streets. The Compañía was looking for Cuban exile pilots, mechanics, navigators, certified scuba divers, anyone who could handle a boat, read a radar screen, anyone with military experience. Cuban medical personnel were also in high demand. Something was up. Something big.

  Two agents took Alberto to an apartment in Coral Gables and hooked him up to a polygraph machine.

  “What is your father’s name?”

  “Rafael Flores.”

  “When were you born?”

  “October fourteenth, 1930.”

  “Are you a Communist?”

  “No!”

  “Are you working for Castro?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Are you a homosexual?”

  “What?”

  After he passed the lie-detector test, he spent a few days taking batteries of U.S. Air Force exams on flying theory, aircraft systems, navigation, weather. Then he went through a series of psychological tests and a complete physical examination before he was flown to a secret CIA base in Nicaragua.

  The base, nestled in the mountains of western Nicaragua, had reminded him of Cuba because of the beauty of the vegetation, the deep forest greens and the vivid, iridescent colors of the flowers. But it was different, he remembered. In Cuba, even in the mountains, you can always sense the sea, and the balmy breezes of the Caribbean follow you everywhere, making the air light and sensual. In Nicaragua the mist hung over the mountains all day and there was an oppressive quality to the atmosphere he had never felt before.

  After he began training with the American instructors, Alberto encountered something else he had never known in Cuba. He learned how it felt to be a stranger, a foreigner. The Americans were nice enough, but in many respects they treated the Cubans like children. Alberto had been flying since he was a teenager, and by the time he escaped he had logged almost seven thousand hours in many kinds of airplanes, but he was far from being the most experienced of the Cuban pilots. The former chief pilot of Cubana de Aviación, Cuba’s national airline, was there, and there were former fighter pilots who could do things with an airplane that would eventually surprise their American instructors.

  The Cubans took the condescending treatment from some of the younger instructors in stride and they joked about it among themselves at night in the barracks.

  But there was something else that had bothered him and the other Cubans, and they had not joked about that. Shortly after arriving at the base, Alberto began to notice that the Cubans were being treated as second-class citizens. They were not consulted, even about matters of which they had superior knowledge. It was very frustrating to sit through a briefing and listen to a CIA agent describe what an aerial photograph shows and know that he is wrong and then to be ignored, as though you were a six-year-old or a blithering idiot, when you pointed out the error.

  “The landing craft can’t get through there.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of those reefs. See there on the picture, those are arrecifes, reefs.”

  “Oh, no. Our photo reconnaissance experts say that’s seaweed.”

  “Well, it’s not seaweed. It’s reefs.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’ve fished that area since I was a child. They are reefs.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to trust the photo experts. It’s seaweed. As I was saying, the landing craft will approach this area from the southwest…”

  Dammit, we didn’t have to lose those men, he thought bitterly, packed like sardines inside the landing craft, stuck on the reefs, sitting ducks for the Communist fighters that swooped down on them, firing wing-mounted rockets with deadly accuracy.

  But worse than being ignored, the Cubans began to be segregated. A sign went up on the door to the bar at the base: CLASSIFIED PERSONNEL ONLY. None of the Cubans had a secret clearance so the sign might as well have said, “No Cubans.” There was no purpose to the sign other than to exclude Cubans. Alberto was furious and he decided to do something about it.

  In the months leading up to the invasion, CIA pilots had been flying missions to drop supplies to the anti-Communist resistance fighting in the Escambray Mountains. The flights were at night and they had a miserable record for accuracy. The CIA pilots did not know the territory and they were coming in too high and often dropping the supplies on the other side of the mountain from where the rebels were, right into the lap of the Communists, who gladly accepted the extra help from Uncle Sam. Alberto went to the base commander to try to persuade him to allow a Cuban crew to fly one of those supply missions.

  “I don’t know. Those are nighttime precision drops that require much flying skill.”

  “Well, they can’t do any worse. Besides, you shouldn’t be risking American lives. This is our fight. You have done so much already, Commander, and believe me we are very grateful.”

  “I guess you’re right. Can’t hurt to try one mission. You’ll be the pilot in command. Pick a good copilot. An American instructor will go with you.”

  The sun was low in the west, casting the long shadows of the mountain peaks across the small airstrip, when the twin radial engines of the B-26 came to life. The Escambray Mountains were nine hundred miles to the northeast, and it would be close to midnight before they arrived over the target.

  Alberto had spent all day looking at the chart, memorizing every detail, making calculations in his head. He remembered taxiing the B-26 to the head of the runway and lining it up, his eyes fixed on the horizon while his experienced hands flew over the instrument panel flipping switches as his copilot called out the pre-takeoff checklist. Fuel booster pumps: check. Flaps ten degrees: check. Ailerons, elevator, rudder: free. Props full forward. Oil pressure: green. Fuel pressure: green. Ammeters, suction, flight instruments: green, green, green.

  He sat on the brakes as he pushed forward smoothly on the throttles, making minute adjustments with the tips of his fingers to synchronize the props until the great World War II-vintage engines sang in harmony. It always annoyed him to see pilots who synchronized the props by looking at the RPM gauges, awkwardly jerking up and down on each throttle as they tried to line up the needles. It’s so much easier to use your ears and listen to the harmonics. And the deep, overpowering baritone of the old war bird was beautiful.

  An hour later a huge moon was rising over the southern Caribbean, and Alberto dropped close to the water. They spoke little. Each man was in his own world. The Cubans had something to prove, and the young instructor sitting behind them knew it.

  The moon was high by the time Alberto saw the shoreline of Cuba. It had been five months since he left, but it felt more like a year, and the sight of the beaches shining white in the moonlight filled him with emotion. To his left, the great bay of Cienfuegos was a pool of silver. Straight ahead he could see the dark silhouette of the Escambray Mountains.

  They crossed the shoreline east of Trinidad and followed a river valley that wound around the dark peaks. A few miles inland, Alberto veered to the left.

  “You’re going off course,” called the ins
tructor from the back.

  “There’s a radio tower around here,” Alberto replied.

  “I don’t see anything on the chart.”

  “It’s under construc—”

  Before Alberto could finish the word, the three of them caught sight of the thin, ghostly outline of a half-completed radio tower speeding past their right wingtip. It had no warning lights.

  Alberto could not suppress a smile as, from the corner of his eye, he saw his instructor searching furiously for a pen to mark the obstruction on the chart. He pulled out his own pen and handed it back without turning his head.

  He then banked right and dove into a narrow ravine that meandered toward the mountain town of Sancti Spiritus, hotbed of the resistance.

  As they approached the drop spot, Alberto eased the B-26 down to treetop level and the instructor tensed up, leaned forward, and tightened his grip on the curved metal rod behind Alberto’s seat. In the dark, the steep walls of the ravine towered above them and they felt so close that it seemed as though you could stretch out your hand and touch them.

  Alberto spotted a dim yellow light flashing ahead in the distance and called to his copilot, “Open bomb-bay doors!”

  The copilot flipped the switch and the big doors in the belly of the aircraft opened with a hydraulic whine.

  The B-26 came over the edge of a clearing, and as it closed in on the point of light, suddenly several other lights flashed, forming a neat V with the single yellow light at the bottom. “It’s them!” yelled the instructor over the sound of the engines.

  “Wait till I say,” said Alberto.

  The copilot raised the red safety cover and put his finger on the switch.