The Sweetness in the Lime

by Stephen Kimber

  I wouldn’t have chosen this as a place to meet—I could barely hear Juany over the din, or through his chewing—but what choice did we have? We’d been in Miami for almost a week and I was no closer to helping Mariela find Tonito, or—more likely—discovering his sad, final fate. I was, my fantasies notwithstanding, not a reporter. Over my years of randomly fact-checking the reporting of others, I’d developed what I thought of as superior internet skills. But those were no match for my current challenge. I needed to find a real reporter who could help. I found Juany on the internet.

  “Why ‘Juany’?” I asked during the small talk between mojitos after I’d exhausted the rest of my repertoire of inconsequential chat. He did not look Hispanic. “I mean, why not Jonathan, or John, or even Johnny?”

  “My mother was an exiliada,” he explained, “one of the non-criminal, non-crazy Cubans who fled here during Mariel back in ’80. The Cubans who came to Miami during that boat lift had a bad rep with the locals, mostly deserved, so she did her best not to acknowledge she was even Cuban. Must have worked. She married my father. He was a banker from New York who somehow ended up in Pensacola. He got caught up in the cocaine business in the nineties. Not sure where he is now, or if he is. The feds were after him, the dealers were after him…. Anyway, my teenaged rebellion was to resurrect a Cuban heritage I didn’t really have—mostly by calling myself Juan instead of Jonathan. My Spanish is still the shits. Jonathan Gravenor looks better as a byline, but Juany gets me contacts in the community. And those contacts are what gets me my stories.” He extended his glass in the direction of a waiter. “Uno…más…por…favor,” he said, emphasizing each word as if pronouncing it for the first time. “And for my friends too.”

  “No, no thanks,” I said, waving off the waiter. Juany’s community contacts were all that interested me. I was looking for someone—anyone—in Miami who cared enough about the fate of Cuban rafters to keep detailed records of their arrivals and current whereabouts.

  “We’ll find him,” I’d gallantly reassured Mariela, Superman to the rescue, after I’d arrived at her door at the Sand Castle late on the afternoon of the day after I’d called. “I’ll find him.” She’d clung to me for what seemed like hours, kissing my neck, leaning back to stare into my face, pressing her face against my chest. Kissing…leaning back…pressing…repeat. And again.

  Mariela’s effusive welcome may have had something to do with her faith in my reassurances. But more likely, Mariela’s own first few days in Miami had mirrored, at least emotionally, my own initial forlorn experiences in Havana. “I felt so alone, so helpless,” she confided.

  “It’s OK,” I whispered in her ear during one chest press. “I’m here now. We’ll find Tonito together.” What was I saying? What was I thinking? What was I doing here at all?

  Before I’d left Halifax, I called C3 and left a message for Steve. “I need some personal time so I won’t be in for a few days,” I explained as neutrally as I could muster to Alana, Steve’s executive assistant.

  “Steve isn’t going to like that,” Alana said. “We just landed that big national tourism account, you know, the one he’s been after for months, so it’s all hands on deck.”

  “Sorry,” I said. I wasn’t. “Just tell him something urgent has come up and I have to go away for a few days. I’m at the airport now, just about to board.”

  I wasn’t. Not then. I was at home waiting for the limo, but I didn’t want to have to talk to Steve, to invent the lie that could explain my absence without explaining that my much younger Cuban wife had suddenly and unsurprisingly left me, not for another man but for a child who was almost certainly dead, and so I needed to go find her, and him.

  “I’ll email him when I land.”

  I didn’t have to. Steve emailed me while I was in the air between Toronto and Miami. Steve wrote that he was “so very disappointed” in his “Writer Man.” I had “let down” the entire C3 team. “Is this how you repay my trust in you?” he demanded, not bothering to explain why his trust in me had not included an actual salaried position with benefits, or even the prospect of severance after having given the company more than a year of loyal service in support of whatever dubious corporate causes paid us to sing their tunes. As it transpired, the question of severance was now no longer moot. “Since I clearly can no longer depend on your loyalty,” Steve finished with a flourish, “I have no choice but to immediately terminate your contract with Coastal Communications Consultancy.” Ever the PR man, however, he immediately added, without a smidgeon of irony, “Thank you for your service. I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavours.”

  I would not have been unhappy, except for one obvious consequence. I could no longer claim the existence of even a precarious contract position in my application to sponsor Mariela. Would I have to update the form? I would need to check with Vince to see—Really? Who was I kidding? Mariela had voluntarily left Canada after having been granted an oh-so-convenient visitor’s visa. She’d landed on American soil and so her lack of Canadian sponsorship didn’t matter. She could stay in the US, become a citizen. She wasn’t coming back to Canada, or to me…or was she? Who knew? Not me. I didn’t ask, and Mariela didn’t volunteer. We had seemingly decided, mutually and without consciously acquiescing, not to discuss her letter, or our relationship, or our future.

  My first order of business had been to relocate us to slightly more upscale accommodation. Even before I left Halifax, I’d Expedia-booked us into the Hacienda Carmelita, a low-slung, lime-green stucco motor hotel off Calle Ocho. It was almost as grungy and almost as cheap as the Sand Castle but—bonus—too far from the beach to attract the surfers and college-kid partiers, or the actual rats Mariela warned me rambled like royalty through the Castle’s rooms at night. Better, the Carmelita was within walking distance of the centre of Little Havana, which Mariela had correctly concluded was the logical place to begin searching for a missing Cuban child. Best—which I’d only taken note after Steve’s email eliminating my job—the Carmelita offered free daily “continental breakfast” in the lobby (mostly just black coffee and dry Cheerios, since neither the toaster nor the bar fridge functioned, “not since last year,” the attendant told me without apology), as well as free Wi-Fi.

  Of course, there was nothing I could have not discovered using the motel’s somnolent Wi-Fi that I couldn’t not have managed easier and faster at home. So, while Mariela anxiously paced the worn plush carpet in our lime-green-with-white-trim room (the owners must have settled on a theme, or at least found a spectacular sale on lime-green paint), I sat on a lumpy twin bed, hovering earnestly over the laptop balanced on my knees. That gave me the false sense I was on an important assignment in a foreign land, being the journalist I wasn’t.

  Despite days of internet sleuthing, in fact, I had not uncovered one single snippet about Tonito’s life or—though I never allowed for this in my earnest we-can-do-this conversations with Mariela—his almost certain death. Perhaps it really was possible for a Cuban to dissolve into the melting pot of the United States, or—again more likely—disappear without trace into the Straits of Florida.

  By chance, I did find a couple of glowing references to Mariela’s ex-husband Alex popping up randomly in the middle of Tripadvisor recommendations about the resort where he’d worked. “Remember the name Alex Jones,” wrote one obviously satisfied customer, a woman from Germany, who gushed “Al has the voice of an angel. The world will be hearing about this very hot Cuban entertainer soon.” I did not share this woman’s recommendation with Mariela.

  One night, after Mariela had gone to sleep, I surfed over to an obituaries’ website called tributes.com and plugged in the full names of each of the Cubans rafters, using the same selected parameters—“2000 to present,” “Florida,” including and not including “notables.” Would being a dead rafter qualify one as a notable in Miami? Not that it mattered. There was only one exact match for the name Alexander Jones.
I’d decided to try, among other possibilities, the formal version of the anglicized name he’d used at the resort. But that Alexander Jones had been eighty-three when he “joined God’s choir of angels” back in 2005.

  There should have been an easy way to match the identities of those who’d departed from Cuba with those who’d arrived in the United States but, thanks to the state of un-relations between the United States and Cuba, no such online database existed. I assumed the United States Coast Guard kept detailed records of the rafters they’d actually rescued at sea. I considered filing a freedom of information request, knowing I would eventually learn the coast guard had no records “responsive to your request.” But that might take a year, or more. Mariela and I were in Miami now.

  The newspaper websites proved no more fruitful. With rare exceptions, like the Elián González affair, Cuban state media largely ignored the existence of the rafters. That unacknowledged stigma, of course, made it less likely that Cubans would officially report their loved ones as missing. Mariela told me she hadn’t bothered to file a missing persons’ report about Alex and Tonito. “What would they do?” she asked sagely enough.

  On the other side of the Straits, the arrival of yet another boatload of rafters seemed to have become so ho-hum the Florida newspapers rarely reported on them anymore, unless as part of a hectoring lecture on the abysmal conditions Cubans still faced in Castro’s repressive police state, leading to their desperation to escape their oppression, “even at the risk of their own lives. For many, death in the Florida Straits is preferable to life in Castro’s Cuba.” Really?

  I couldn’t find a single website offering dependable, exact—or even approximate but agreed upon—statistics showing how many Cubans had attempted the perilous ninety-mile sea crossing from their homeland to the United States. Or how many had died in the attempt. Four out of every ten, declared one site. Seven out of ten, claimed another. In any case, even the most conservative estimates suggested there were thousands—tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands—of Cubans who’d left Cuba but never arrived at their destination. How could I discover the fate of just one grain of sand among all those grains in that ocean of a shitstorm?

  One night early on, while randomly searching “Cuba,” “rafters,” “statistics,” “Florida,” “Straits,” “rescue,” “death,” I came across a Miami New Times article on Cuban rafters by one Jonathan Gravenor. It wasn’t at all what I’d been looking for. The story focused on the rafters’ successes in integrating into the Miami community, and the only statistics he quoted had to do with all the new businesses these entrepreneurial newcomers had started. Still, it was an interesting story, quoting lots of rafters, including several who’d arrived in 2004. I bookmarked the story, initially thinking I might try to track a few of them down later, if nothing else panned out.

  Nothing else did.

  Mariela and I even spent a futile day walking up and down Calle Ocho showing random passersby photos of Tonito, Alex, Delfín, and Roberto. The fact Mariela had carried all of their photos—along with copies of each of their birth certificates and even a snapshot Roberto’s mother had taken of the raft in the garage—from Cuba to Canada, and then to Miami made it obvious, even to my most trusting, ever hopeful self, that Mariela had calculated and orchestrated every step of her journey. I also had to acknowledge to myself, if not Mariela, just how pop-star handsome young Alex appeared to be in the photos. I did gush over Tonito. “Such a beautiful boy! He looks just like his mother,” I said. Not that he did, not really, not to me at least. Mariela blushed and held the photo close to her chest, smiled to herself, if only for a moment. Mission accomplished.

  That night, back in the hotel room, I’d looked up Jonathan Gravenor’s website. There were links to a number of other stories he’d written about Cuban exiles, as well as about changing Cuban American attitudes toward US-Cuba relations. I tracked down a phone number and called him. On the telephone, Jonathan had sounded considerably older and significantly wiser than the schlubby, late-twentysomething Juany who now sat across from us at the Versailles, scarfing his way through his paella and ordering guava cheesecake (also the most expensive item on the menu) for dessert.

  I hadn’t told him much on the phone—asking for a friend…Cuban woman looking for family members…rafters…came to Florida in 2004…disappeared…wants to reunite. Perhaps he assumed we knew they’d actually made it to Florida. Likely, he saw a poignant, happy-ending family reunion tale in it all. And now he was as disappointed with me as I was with him.

  “This,” he said, pointing at the photos and birth certificates, “is all you have to go on?”

  “I know it’s not much,” I began, apologetic, “but—”

  Mariela cut me off. It was the first time she’d spoken since we introduced ourselves while we waited to be seated. “I have more,” she said, taking a notebook out of her purse. “I know the exact hour of the day when they left, the hour-by-hour weather for the week after that, the currents in the Straits of Florida at that time of year—”

  “OK, OK.” Juany held up his hands in a gesture that looked remarkably like a benediction but was really surrender. “I get where you’re coming from.” Caught in the searchlight of Mariela’s green eyes, perhaps recognizing for the first time the unplumbable depths of her pain and eagerness, Juany seemed to connect Mariela with someone else, perhaps to his own rafter mother. His “been there, done that” tone lost its brittle edge, and his features rearranged themselves into an expression approaching empathy.

  “Let me think,” he said finally. He swallowed his food, put down his fork. “I may know someone…” he began. “I don’t know him exactly, but I have contacts with people who know him. He’s this old guy, a brigadista, was involved in all the plots to overthrow Castro, may still be for all I know. But he kept—keeps—records of everything that happens that has to do with Cuba. Everything. If anyone knows—”

  “Will you?” Mariela cut him off, urgent now. “Please.”

  “I can try,” Juany replied, adding for Mariela’s benefit. “I will try. But there are no guarantees. He lives alone. No phone. So it will take me a few days. But I’ll be in touch, one way or the other.”

  He took a sip of his cafecito, turned to me, morphing suddenly back into his cocky, journalist persona. “And hey, if we do find the kid, I get first dibs on the story. OK?”

  2

  Mariela and I looked at one another, giggling like schoolkids at the back of the bus pulling a naughty on the teacher during a school excursion. “One…two…” I whispered as we scrunched down in our seats, out of view of the man with the microphone standing at the front, swaying to the bus’s motion. “Three!”

  When the man with the mic intoned, one more time, in his heavily German-accented English, “so many riches and famous people living here,” we mouthed along in sync, doing our best to stifle our laughter, failing, then doing our best to appear duly chastened in the face of the disapproving stares from the other tourists seated around us, failing at that as well, and then doing our best one more time to ignore all of them while we snuggled deeper into the seat, into each other, finally succeeding at that.

  It felt good to play tourist, to forget for a moment why we were here and where all of whatever this was, or was not, might eventually lead for Mariela, for me, for both of us, together or apart. The Best of Miami Bus Tour had been my idea. Since Juany told us it might take him a few days to track down his brigadista and since we had run out of ideas for finding the unfindable, I suggested we pretend to be tourists for the day instead. Mariela eagerly agreed, seeming as relieved as I was to let Juany’s brigadista serve as our beacon of faint hope, at least for the day.

  I’d assumed the tour would showcase Miami’s history and culture while helping me finally situate myself geographically in this city of towers and turnpikes, but it turned out to be a guided tour—in rotating English, Spanish, and German—of the homes of
all the “riches and famous people” who live, or once lived, in Miami.

  “Over here on your left you can see Fisher Island, man-made, the richest zip code in all the United States,” our guide gushed as the bus lumbered across the MacArthur Causeway. “One-hundred-and-fifty families from forty nations…Steffi Graff, Oprah, Boris Becker, and so many riches and famous businessmens from all over the world…. On your right is Star Island, one of the most exclusive communities in all Florida…Elizabeth Taylor, Shaq, Ricky Martin, Carmen Electra, Julio Iglesias, Sean Combs…so many, many riches and famous people have called this island home…. And see…Palm Island just beyond that…Paris Hilton has a house here. And the gangster Al Capone, he once lived in a wonderful house at 93 Palm Avenue…That house,” our guide chuckled, “could be yours, ladies and gentlemen. All you need is $6.8 million, and you too could be one of Miami’s—” wait for it—“riches and most famous peoples.”

  During the course of our two-hour tour, there also seemed to be more ambivalent references to cocaine and the wealth it had brought to Miami in the eighties and nineties than to the Cuban exiles who’d helped define the city for previous generations of Americans. But we did pass the Versailles (“famous Cuban restaurant, many famous peoples eat there”) and the gates of the Woodlawn cemetery (“the final resting place for two former presidents from Cuba, three former presidents of Nicaragua…and so many other riches and famous dead people”) on our rumbling ride through Little Havana. I wondered, but only briefly, if four un-riches, un-famous Cubans might be buried there now too.

  “We stop here,” our guide said as the bus made a brief stretch-and-spend stop on Calle Ocho. “It mean 8 Street in Spanish language,” he helpfully explained, adding that the Cubans, who’d arrived on the street beginning in the sixties and bought houses from Jews moving to Miami Beach, had now themselves mostly moved on. “Not so many Cubans as before because so many peoples from Central and Latin America here now,” he explained, quickly moving on to more riches and famous. “On this street, you will see stars on the sidewalk like in Hollywood and California, singers and many other riches and famous peoples from Latin America, Spain, Cuba…you can make some pictures.”