by Marcial Gala
CLARO ARGÜELLES QUESADA, former Poder Popular delegate in Punta Gotica
From the beginning, they should have been clear with them, told them, No, you’re not going to spend the province’s limited resources on that mad temple, no, and that’s final. But they were cowards, they were afraid they would be accused of being racist and antireligious—even more so since in the beginning, when the American pastor put down the first ten thousand dollars, Stuart and Basulto made sure that the presence of the Holy Sacrament congregation, or the Sacramentalists, as people called them, was felt at every event reaffirming the Revolution. It was a wise move. You couldn’t organize anything for the anniversary of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution without them showing up. They were the first ones to donate blood. They went to do volunteer work and to the May 1 and July 26 parades. The only thing I couldn’t get from them was their participation in an event repudiating one of those so-called independent journalists. They flat out refused to attend. I latched onto that and went to see the president of Poder Popular and said to him:
“If you’ll excuse me, compañero presidente, they’ve been building that temple for ten years and there’s no end in sight; if it keeps growing, it’s going to exceed this very building in height and that wouldn’t be good … On the other hand, they’re wasting necessary resources for social projects; many of the homes in the neighborhood are falling to pieces.”
“They pay in dollars and on time, so don’t worry,” the president said to me.
“Yes, but it’s not just the money. It’s also the ideological character of this construction; imagine, to allow that church is to give the enemy more power, they’ve even been featured on a program in Miami, one called Sábado Gigante.”
“Sábado Gigante?” the president asked me. “Do you watch those things?”
“No, not me, I saw it by accident.”
“And what did they say on this Sábado?”
“That in Cienfuegos, we’re crazy, that communism must have gone to our heads if we’re allowing the blacks to make a cathedral.”
“You see, delegate,” the president said. “That’s the point, in Cienfuegos, we’re erecting the first cathedral that is truly for and by the meek, even the enemy has to recognize it.”
“Yes, but the thing is that it was never a Black Cathedral, compañero presidente, and you’ll excuse me, that cathedral belongs to that crazy Holy Sacrament congregation, and it may have grown a lot in recent times, but I can assure you that it doesn’t have twenty thousand members, and the majority only come for the snacks and the American donations.”
“So what? What matters is what people think, remember that this is a Battle of Ideas.”
I was about to resign right there as a Poder Popular delegate in Punta Gotica; it rubbed me the wrong way that intelligent people, aware of how things work in this world, would fall for such a mirage. I knew that to permit the Sacramentalist cathedral was to condemn that neighborhood and Cienfuegos itself to failure, in spite of the tourists who didn’t ask anymore where the Reina Cemetery was, or Martí Park or Jagua Hotel, but came here to Punta Gotica and swooned over the crumbling houses, the people sitting on the sidewalk right in the middle of the workday, the blaring music, and the filth. All to photograph a building that never got finished and that reminded me a little of Juraguá’s nuclear power plant, another failure. How long can this go on? I thought, watching as the neighborhood filled up with little stands and used-book vendors, all to have something to sell to the foreigners.
In addition, that Arturo Stuart now thought he was a tough guy, he seemed like more of a Poder Popular delegate than I did. He thought he was some kind of mayor. If someone needed medication, they went to see him; if an alcoholic’s family wanted to take his house away, they went to see him. I was practically little more than a decorative object, and his kids, well, the three of them were unbelievable; one, Johannes, with that little Italian boyfriend who would come up beeping in his Willys jeep, waking up the neighbors and propagating an ideology he didn’t believe in. I went to see the exposition she organized in the ruins of the Goytisolo Palace, and, well, the truth is that the girl has talent as a painter, but what is all that? Those loose women wrapped in the nation’s flag? I don’t know how they allowed it, really. No wonder she left for Italy and never came back, she was always a gusana, a worm. As far as the other kid is concerned, the one called Prince, he still hadn’t shown his claws yet, but we already knew he would be a case, we already knew. You would see him go by with those little poetry books under his arm and that good-boy face, and you wouldn’t be able to comprehend how he could be initiated into Palo, could be superstitious, so removed from the necessary dialectic vision of the world, just like the rest of the Stuart family. Initiated into Palo and still preaching at the Church of the Holy Sacrament, I don’t know how his father didn’t catch on, well, it’s incredible. Of course, the worst was the other one, that one was already pegged as one of the neighborhood’s juvenile delinquents, a personal friend of Antón Abramovich, alias el Ruso, the worst of his kind in Punta Gotica and the whole city, a foreigner that the Revolution should have deactivated a long time ago, but who, without a doubt, had connections in the highest spheres, since his bar / gambling den / restaurant was the most corrupt place in the city, and things went on as usual …
FERREIRO
I went to Cienfuegos three times, looking for Araceli. The first time was because her own father asked me to. The other two, on my own account, at my own risk. I never found her, to tell the truth. She knew how to hide. But years later, I was having some drinks with my buddies when Manolo says to me, Hey, Alcibíades, that one really looks like Araceli. I look at the TV and notice a blonde who’s giving the meteorological report, and though she was wearing more makeup and looked classier, it could only be her. Fuck, I thought, but I didn’t say anything, I acted indifferent. I know she left me out of spite because someone told her I was with Elisa.
In those early days, if I had found her, I would have disgraced myself. I was in such a state that if you’d stuck a needle in me, I wouldn’t have bled. I took Araceli from her home when she was fifteen, and I was her first husband. We were so hopeful when we married, our wedding was a high-end event, I invited some mariachis from Santa Clara, who even sang the fucking “Mañanitas del rey David,” and then we went to Varadero and spent our honeymoon at the Hotel Internacional at a time when it was rare to see a Cuban around there, I spent nearly eighty thousand pesos on those nuptials, but it didn’t bother me: Araceli was the most beautiful thing in town and she was mine. Our disagreements started when she told me she wanted to keep going to school, as if being married to a man like me, with money and properties, wasn’t enough for her, but I gave in. If you want to study, then go ahead, get to it, I said to her, take a waitressing course or something like that, it could always be useful, but, no, she wanted to finish high school and go on to college and act important, and I didn’t like that, although I agreed to it; in the end, she spent all day reading, mostly poetry, and she talked to me as if she thought she was better than me, and the strangest thing in the world was, I also thought that in a way she had something different about her than all the other women I’d been with before, she was, like, classier and more sensitive, and I was naïve enough to think that because of that, I could trust her. So to find out that in addition to having left me, she was a lesbian in Cienfuegos, it was hard for me, really. I would have preferred to see her dead, and that’s what I told her parents.
“Tell her that if she comes around here, I don’t want to see her, because if I see her, I’ll ignore her; what she did to me, you don’t do that to a man.”
Her brother jumped out like a fighting cock. If you touch her, Ferreiro, I’ll kill you, he said to me, but I looked him in the eye, and he had to bow his head in shame: a man who defends a lesbian and a whore isn’t worth anything, even if the witch is his sister, and especially since I’d given her everything. She didn’t want for anything wit
h me, she was the apple of my eye, but she failed me in the end and she disrespected me and I thought I would never forgive her, that I was going to spend the rest of my life looking for her, but it wasn’t like that, I went to Cienfuegos three times to look for her, but then I got tired, I didn’t go anymore, although people looked down on me like I wasn’t a real man, as if I wasn’t capable of satisfying a woman and that was why she left me. Isn’t that something?
I kept an eye out for her, she was very close to her mother and I was sure that one day I’d see her crossing these streets, but it didn’t happen that way. She never returned to Cabaiguán, or at least not that I saw.
GRINGO
Margaret was a much tougher conquest than picking up Elsa. She was fifty-seven years old, and when I met her, she was all dressed in black latex, so beautiful from far off that she looked like she’d escaped from a version of Charlie’s Angels, but by then, Margaret wasn’t even fit for vultures anymore. She was keen on motorcycles. She had a shop where she sold the best Italian bikes, but what she really adored were Harleys, and she was from Memphis, Tennessee, where Elvis Presley lived, and where, of course, they killed Martin Luther King.
I saw her get off her Harley, which seemed brand-new, and go into her shop.
I followed her, thinking she was just another customer, but when I saw the employees bending over backward to show her how efficient they were, I understood that she was the owner or the main shareholder. I went up to one of the motorcycles on display, a Ducati that looked like a spaceship, and pretended to be interested, but in reality, I was watching her. An employee came up to me, a young black guy with the face of a trained dog.
“The best,” he said to me in English, with indifference. “It has an elevated dual exhaust, a single-sided swing arm, monobloc brakes, and 560 cc for the most powerful twin-cylinder engine ever sold.”
“I also used to sell motorcycles in Cuba,” I said to gain his trust.
“Oh, really. Ducatis?”
“No, no way, MZT, Jawas, Carpatis, and Benjovinas.”
“Really, I don’t know those brands…”
“Well, they were very good … Who’s that woman, man?” I pointed at Margaret, who was talking to another employee, a white, blond-haired one who I didn’t like the looks of from the start.
“That one?” the yuma asked me as if he were deaf.
“Yes, of course.”
“That’s Margaret O’Sullivan, the owner of the store. I’m surprised you don’t know her.”
“Why would I know her?”
“Everyone here in Louisville knows her … she was the 500 cc world champion…”
“Well then…” To gain time, I asked him to tell me a little more about the motorcycle.
She came up to us. The thing is, I was dressed as if I’d just gotten one of those stars they put on Hollywood Boulevard, I had money and good taste and that opens all doors in Cuba and this country as well, to be honest.
“Hello,” she said, stretching out her long, dry hand.
“Hi.” I shook it and looked straight into those gray old-lady eyes that had a twinkle of youth.
“Give us a minute, Timothy,” she said, without looking at the employee.
GUTS
Cubans are everywhere; all of them are or say they are artists. Even though you see them collecting garbage on Las Ramblas or as bathroom attendants at a nightclub, they say they are artists and poets. If Berta were here, she would love it, because she always had an artistic soul, like a writer and all that. I’ll tell you that I didn’t really like seeing her become a lesbian. That little white girl, Araceli, didn’t have much of a body, but she had a face prettier than anything I’ve seen over here in Europe. She and Berta were a good couple. I didn’t believe it when the rumors started. I think it was Piggy, to get in good with me, who told me, Berta’s a lesbian, and I said to him, Sure, she’s banging your mother, but later I saw how the two of them looked at each other. I think Berta’s mother never accepted it.
You’ve got to be tougher here than in Cienfuegos, any druggie has a gun and will shoot you over any little thing, it’s not like over there, although the truth is that el Ruso was having problems from the start, he was too opportunistic for my liking, despotic, nothing ever seemed right to him and he usually treated people like dogs. I still remember how he drawled his words and would start talking shit about how in Moscow, how in Saint Petersburg, as if we didn’t know he was actually Ukrainian. Here in Barcelona there are also a lot of Ukrainians, they’re worse than the Arabs, no one’s more deceptive and fast-talking. I was with a chick from Kiev, superhot and all that, Irina with the blue eyes, but within a month she’d filled my house with people, and her father liked to play the accordion. I hate the accordion. One day, I hid it, and that’s as far as things got, Irina and I had a tremendous fight, it was awful. I had a brawl with her older brother, Oleg was his name, he had been a sailor with the Black Sea fleet, but he couldn’t take me on, I won. I really knocked him in that Misha-the-Bear nose of his and then got my gun from the trunk and pointed it at all three of them. “You leave here right now,” I told them, and they started speaking in Ukrainian and crying, but then they got out.
“Go sleep on Las Ramblas,” I repeated, by way of goodbye.
But getting back to Mr. Antón Abramovich, Ukrainian Cuban, whom we all called el Ruso, I never liked him. He had this scornful little way about him, just unbearable, and when Cricket came to work with us, things got worse. Cricket liked Yusimí with the light-colored eyes, and el Ruso, who was sly and greedy down to his bones, noticed, and I was in the middle, since Cricket, being from Camagüey and all, was my lifelong friend, and in my innocence, I thought there was something like honor in the world. That if I defend you, you defend me. That if I’m your brother, you’re my brother. I was wrong. Because Cricket had no friends. It seems that old man Stuart’s beatings had taken his manhood away, I don’t know, or it seems that he really was in love with Johannes, and something about him was weird, he wasn’t a man of honor. He acted like el Ruso’s damn slave. He disappointed me, and when everything went rotten, he picked el Ruso, and el Ruso had no scruples and let them put him in prison.
El Ruso watched as the cathedral went up and he wanted the Sacramentalists to give us something. “To protect them,” he said, “so that no one steals their materials and slows down their work.”
He called Gordo Gris and me, and he told us to talk to Basulto and explain that he, Antón Abramovich, had to be shown respect; he needed some kind of compensation for not having decided to erect an Orthodox church in the middle of Punta Gotica. After all, the Arabs could come and talk to the Poder Popular president and erect a mosque at any point, and that shouldn’t be allowed, how could it be, but you know, to him, Antón Abramovich, they were all the same: a guy from Camagüey or a Jew or a guy from the eastern part of the island, or an Arab, so they should understand, there were rules to be followed in Cienfuegos. “Come on,” Gordo Gris said to me, and we got in the jeep and went to see that Basulto, a little white nothing of a man who was nonetheless good at dodging blows.
“I don’t have anything to do with that,” he said. “The treasurer is brother Stuart, go see him.”
Gordo always wore gray and was always sad. He had been a policeman in Matanzas, and he killed a guy during carnival because he called him “whale.” They gave him ten years. In prison, he got his nickname, Gordo Gris. He didn’t get out until fourteen years later because he nearly killed another guy. He came to Cienfuegos, and el Ruso hired him right away. He was light-skinned and could pass for white. He liked to beat up blacks, and if they were blacks who were good with the ladies, even more so: he hadn’t fucked a real female since the days of President Machado. He had a small prick. He didn’t show it to any of the whores, and he threatened Magali, If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you. He took out his rage on blacks. He was dying to give Cricket a beating, but Cricket was sacred. El Ruso wouldn’t let anyone touch him, and Cricket, when he’d tosse
d back a few, would laugh at Gordo Gris, he called him fatty and an old bitch of an ex-con. That’s why, when we were told that we had to go see Cricket’s dad, Gordo Gris was happy.
“We’re going to strip that old black man down to nothing.”
“It’s not going to be easy,” I said. “We have to be diplomatic.”
“That’s your job,” he said.
GRINGO
Give us a minute, Timothy.
That’s how these American women are, when they don’t need you, you become a nothing, like a Ducati with legs. They think they’re competitive, but at heart they’re just fools. They’re so scared of lies that the majority of them don’t know how to spot a liar, anyone can pull one over on them. Here you can say you’re selling land on the moon, and there will always be a few morons to buy it from you.
My money was running out, it’s incredible how much you have to spend to maintain the standard of living I was used to after marrying Elsa, and this Margaret sweated money. I asked her how much the Ducati was.
“Fifty-five thousand with an initial deposit of twenty thousand … We include the accessories; in other words, a whole mechanic’s kit and a black racing-team jacket.”
“What about in cash?”
“In cash, it’s fifty thousand. I came over to see to you myself because I can tell you have good taste, and this motorcycle is very special to me, it’s the best Italy has designed, and believe me, you won’t regret it.”
“Okay, I’m going to think about it … Are you the manager?” I asked as if I didn’t care, and she clarified that she was the main shareholder and founder of the shop.