“Tell this dude,” said Butler, “that there is nothing more important than our flares. We are going to wait until the truck arrives.”
I never had to translate his remark. Our vehicle came along then. It was not a truck, but an old and very large Lincoln sedan, showing a faded green paint job in the dawn.
We loaded fourteen muddy cartons into the trunk and rear seat of the car, and with no more than a blanket to cover all visible loot, the driver, who looked young enough to be a student, offered one remarkable smile, his teeth as white as his mustache was black, and took off in the direction he had come.
There was now nothing to do but go back downstream. We would have to spend our day in the thicket hoping to find a place where we would not be tormented altogether by insects. Tonight, we would inflate our dinghy and return to La Princesa. I could feel Butler’s disappointment that no more had happened.
I could understand. There should have been more. It took no more than twenty minutes to return to the beach. I will not dwell on our day. We were in tropical woods and foliage. There was nothing for it but to pick a spot in the brush, drench ourselves in insect repellent, and try to sleep in the miserable condition of starting up each time a sound came from the forest. Out at sea we could hear patrol boats, and above us, in the spiderweb of sky visible through overhanging foliage, jet planes passed. Once in the morning and again in the afternoon, a helicopter took its airborne promenade along the beach. Time passed in a misery of insects macho enough to fight through repellent and make the sting. I discovered that the secret was not to push against the phlegmatic disposition of time.
At twilight, a fiery apocalypse descended in the west between green and purple clouds. With evening, the insects grew ferocious. Butler would wait no longer and had us move the rubber boat out to a sandbar near the mouth of the stream. Still protected by foliage, we took turns on the foot pump and in half an hour, it was inflated. We were loading the last of our rifles, ammunition boxes, and machetes, when a gunboat, perhaps thirty feet long, motored along, scanning the beach. If it had been less dark, we might have been detected.
Fifteen minutes later, we put out to sea. It would not take thirty minutes to reach our rendezvous, but we no longer wanted to stay on land. It was as if we had to quit the dark earth body of Cuba, too fecund, too strange. I felt like an insect buried in the thick mat of an enormous beast, nothing visible of his head, his tail, his limbs.
We rode out, hunched over in a low profile, and I, sitting beside Butler, my eye on the compass and the tide, muttered small corrections to him from time to time. Although he was never partial to the suggestions of others on how to adjust any of his skills, since he was possessive of all of them, he had come to recognize that I knew more about boats than he did, as well I should with a boyhood of Maine summers, even if little enough of it had been spent in blubbercraft stink-pots such as this, but, yes, I knew navigation, and he sensed it, and we were on the mark, and thirty minutes early. No Martínez, no sight of La Princesa, but at least we were past the coral reefs and the mangrove keys, and if a patrol boat was going to bear down on us now, it would not come from the near lee of a dark island.
With Martínez nowhere in sight, we headed further out to sea. There was the likelihood, or so we had been told in Miami, that the Cuban Coast Guard would not respect the three-mile limit if no American gunboats were visible, but we rode higher in the water now, our weight reduced by 560 pounds of delivered flares. If the twin outboards held up, our dinghy ought to compete with the speed of any old and much-repaired Cuban craft.
A half hour later, after completing the four turns of a nautical square, we came back to where I hoped and calculated La Princesa would be. It was another dark night and another clear sky, but far to the east, clouds were being driven by wind.
Butler began to question my navigation. Could I have taken us through a trapezoid? Could I swear we were in the proper place?
“We are at the coordinates of the rendezvous,” I said with all the confidence I could muster (although confidence was a tattered flag within), but I knew we could not steer by committee, so I convinced him to take one more square, this time but a half mile on each leg. At 11:15, La Princesa came motoring toward us looking as large as a galleon. Butler shook my hand. “We’ll make a team yet,” he said, and La Princesa idling, we came alongside, unloaded the dinghy, pulled it up after us, and went to the galley for coffee. I wondered if it ever felt better after a good day of rock climbing with Harlot.
It was then Butler asked about the line of quarantine. “It’s over. The Russian ships have turned back,” Martínez said. He repeated this news to the prácticos, and they received it without great happiness. There would be no invasion of Cuba now. Our flares would moulder in whichever dubious place they were stored.
Martínez had a more immediate concern, however. The other boat had missed its rendezvous. Martínez said, “That is why we were late. We waited for the others. Now we go back to look for them again.”
It was a long hour. We ground along at half throttle, suffering a whiplike roll in the new wind that came out of the east. Tropical rain followed. I could see by our nearness to the mangrove keys that we were considerably closer to land than the three-mile limit.
Martínez said, “If they were chased from shore, they will be hiding in these keys,” and he pointed with his pencil light to some mangrove isles on the chart. “I know the práctico who is leading the party. He is familiar with these lagoons. In there it is too shallow for the Castros to follow.”
“What have you heard from Mr. O’Brien?” asked Butler.
“It was he who told me about the Russians.”
“What else did he say?”
“He said: Return to Miami. Pronto.”
“Why?”
“He said to tell you he was handling all kinds of hell.” Martínez shrugged. “That may be true, but how am I to leave men behind?”
Butler nodded. He looked happy. “Hubbard,” he said, “you and me have to go out and look for them.”
Martínez nodded.
It was foolhardy. We would search through unfamiliar lagoons for Cubans who might not even be there, but I would make no objection. It was easier to go back into those waters than to live with the knowledge that Butler was my moral superior.
We were ready. On our return, we would rendezvous with Martínez at a point midway between two mangrove keys on our chart. It would be inside the three-mile limit and that could prove hazardous for him, but it was simpler for us. Every hour for the next four hours, he would make a running pass through that area, and if we were not back by then, we were all in trouble, for it would be close to dawn. Now we spent twenty minutes in the galley going over the charts to mark the shallows in each of the keys and reefs we would be exploring.
Out in the dinghy, with no more than Butler and myself for ballast, handling was lively. At twenty knots we planed from wave to wave until the roar of the echoes chased us down to low throttle again, but now we knew the speed of our craft.
The area Martínez had chosen for us to explore contained in three square miles five keys and four coral lagoons. Methodically, shallow by shallow, our twin outboards raised until we drew no more than six inches, we ventured into every pool and bottom we could find in the dark, running aground in sand and mud, backing off, only to run aground again. Our rubber bow, bent by the trap of submerged roots, sprang back when we were free, our bottom scraped on shoals, we could have been blind men feeling our way through a cave. It was curious. The deeper we explored into each shallows, the further away seemed Castro’s coast guard. I began to feel as if we were infiltrating our way into an organism. Swarms of insects welcomed us in each lagoon, and we traversed the coral reefs ripple by ripple, my eyes beginning to see a spectrum of differentiations in the dark until I hated to flash the pencil light on the chart, for it deprived me for a little while of such keen sight. I realized that I was feeling something close to affection for Butler. He had forced me into
our venture, yet it was worth it. How much it was worth! Entering this wilderness of swamp, wild growth, and water was equal to exploring every cavern of myself where demeaning fear was stored. On we went.
There were few openings in the mangrove keys, and many entrances dwindled into trackless swamps, but we kept the anticipation that in one of these shallow flows we would find our people. So we thought, and at the depth of each small exploration, one of us would cry like a mournful bird, “Parangón.”
In the third hour, in the lightening air before the last dark hour preceding dawn, we heard a man croak back, “Incompetente.” So, we found him. A weak voice. He lay with one foot caked in blood on the rubber floor of his ruptured dinghy. He had ripped the boat open on a coral reef, had reached this stream, and tugging the boat behind, had lacerated his foot.
Where were the others?
Dead, he said. Captured. There had been an ambush. They had all been ambushed, and only he and his friend had escaped to the boat.
Where was his friend?
Dead. A patrol boat had chased them. His friend had taken a machine-gun bullet that blew him out of the boat. Right in the middle of the pursuit.
“Bullshit,” whispered Butler to me. “He threw the dead man overboard so the dinghy would go faster.”
“None of the story works,” I said.
It didn’t. On the pretense of looking at the blood oozing through his boot, I used the pencil light to study his face. He had a scrawny beard, a straggling mustache, a thin and sallow face—he looked like a man you would not trust: one more failed version of the son of God.
Did it matter now what he had done or failed to do? Unless he had dashed off in the boat while the others were ambushed on land, his real story, whatever cowardice it might protect, was probably true to this degree: The others were gone. He certainly had the look of a man who had lost the men around him.
There was one more question: Was the patrol boat that had chased him into this narrow inlet still circling the key?
We found the answer. We had just emerged from this swamp when a cabin cruiser with a searchlight in its bow came around a low promontory and bore down on us.
How loud was the machine gun! How dazzling its light! Tracers struck the water to the right of us, then to the left, for we were careening side to side. Were we two hundred yards from the patrol boat or was it closer?
I remember that I had no fear of dying. Adrenaline kept prayer at bay. I was enormously excited. I was full of awe. Death was a great temple and we stood at the gate—the light from the muzzle of the machine gun seemed as livid as a high-voltage spark jumping a gap. The sky seemed to jump, or was it our boat? The stars leapt like fireworks. I remember letting loose a prodigious whoop. Butler screamed at our pursuers, “Fuck your eye-e-e-e-e-e-s.” He would stand up from time to time to draw a higher angle of fire, then dip into a quick turn. Each time he stood up, the machine gun would fire at his head, and its tracers went into the air. Since those tracers were no longer kicking up water to the left or right of us, the machine gunner lost his aim and Butler would veer off at a wild angle to escape him for a few seconds. Once, we even lost the searchlight as well, and streaked in the dark around the bend of a key and on over a coral reef we had negotiated already and knew we could draft. Before that shallow, the patrol boat had to bear off. In a fury, it sounded its Klaxon. The siren screamed through the dark as loudly as if the invasion of Cuba had commenced after all. Butler was sobbing from laughing so hard. “All cops are the same,” he said. “All the world over.”
We picked up another channel on the other side of the reef, put our dinghy up to full throttle and plotted a course for rendezvous. A mile to the east, I could see our pursuer searching every lagoon and shore with its light. I punched Butler on the arm. It was inescapable. No one was worse than Butler.
“You son of a bitch, you are fucking pure,” I said, which was as much obscenity as I had ever put into a sentence. It all went into the broil. Given the noise of our outboards, he could hardly hear me.
21
October 30, 1962
Dear Kittredge,
Well, we have all gone through such exceptional experiences these last ten days. I am still piecing together the various crises with the Russians, and, of course, I wait to hear what you will add to these matters. I will say that I am impressed once again by your psychic powers. In your last letter to me—it does seem a year ago—you said, “Do not do anything insane with people like Dix Butler.”
I did, and have lived not to regret it, and would write to you about our eight-reeler in the swamps but am worn out. Suffice it that after two trips in a rubber dinghy through Cuban territory, we managed to get back to our mother ship, La Princesa. I wish to write to you now about its skipper, a remarkable man named Eugenio Martínez.
The return trip, incidentally, was gloomy. We lost five men and Eugenio did not wish to return without looking for them through another day, but a radio message came from Harvey. Martínez was commanded to come back. It was an emergency, stated Harvey.
Martínez followed these orders, although they went against every instinct in him. He fell into the most palpable depression. It was a bad loss. Whole networks have been rolled up in Havana, but our sea missions usually get away with lighter casualties. So we drank a lot of rum to fortify ourselves against the chop returning to Miami, and before it was over, Martínez told a gloomy tale I want to pass on to you. It enabled me to recognize why he reacts to depression as if it were his antagonist. Ghost-ridden, his dread is deep at not returning for those lost prácticos.
The story he told concerned an old friend named Cubela, Rolando Cubela. By the portrait Martínez gave of him, Cubela was a student leader back in the early fifties when there must have been a dozen such fellows at the University of Havana ready to overthrow Batista. Fidel Castro happens to be the man who emerged from the crucible, but there were others. Cubela was one of them. Rolando Cubela de Cuba. Sounds like a jefe, does it not? Martínez went into no details on Cubela’s appearance, and I did not dare to interrupt, since Eugenio does speak out of an inner gravity that tends to solemnize one’s reactions when around him, but I did receive a powerful impression that Cubela is a man of some physical stature, more than ordinarily handsome, and full of presence (not unlike Castro, what?). For that matter, Cubela, according to Martínez, has now become one of Castro’s intimates.
Let me take it in order. Back in 1956, Martínez and Cubela belonged to a student group who believed in calculated assassination of government officials. Under Batista, there was a plenitude of sadistic officers, but the Martínez-Cubela concept was not to attack the worst monsters, because truly bad officials stirred up enormous animosity against the regime. It was Batista’s decent officials who had to be done away with—they confused the issue! The target selected, therefore, was the chief of military intelligence, a gentleman named Blanco Rico who was not only opposed to torture, but had a reputation for courtesy to his captives. By vote of their cell, Cubela was selected to pull the trigger. I couldn’t, incidentally, quite make out the politics of this group—some sort of anarcho-syndicalism, perhaps, with middle-class roots. Cubela, for instance, was studying medicine—ah, these Cubans! On a night in October 1956, at which time Castro was already in the Sierra Maestra, Cubela managed to encounter Blanco Rico in a Havana nightclub called Montmartre (homage to Toulouse-Lautrec!) and proceeded to put a bullet through his head. “Rico died,” said Martínez, “but only after he lived long enough to look Cubela in the eye and smile. That smile has been described to me one hundred times. It was generous. To Cubela, it said: ‘My friend, you have made a grave mistake, and I forgive you, even if my ghost will not.’
“At that moment, of course, Cubela did not linger. He ran out into a waiting car, drove away to a place of concealment, and in a week we smuggled him out to Miami. I joined Rolando the following week. Havana was no longer comfortable for our people. With the death of Blanco Rico, the Batista police were running amok.
“One of our group came from a family who had money in Miami. Alemán. He owned the Miami Stadium and a cheap motel. That was where we lived. At his motel. The Royal Palms.”
Kittredge, I am afraid I interrupted Martínez here. “The Royal Palms,” I said, “is exactly where I stayed when I first came to Miami.”
“That, Robert Charles, may be why I tell this story.” He swigged his rum. “Salud.”
We drank. He talked. I will not try any longer to suggest his speech. I find even as I attempt to recapture his tone that I miss a portion of it. And, of course, I find myself improving his English. Let me summarize what he said, and where I do recall an expression that truly belonged to him, I will, of course, offer it to you. It seems that the Royal Palms was housing a good number of revolutionaries at this time, all rent-free, and Cubela and Martínez lived there as roommates. Cubela was considered a hero, but Blanco Rico dominated his dreams. “Blanco Rico keeps smiling,” Cubela told Martínez. “It goes so far into me that a cancer is forming in my intestines.”
Cubela recovered, however. Rico disappeared from his dreams. So he decided to go back to Cuba and fight for Castro in the Sierra Escambray. Since this was another front, separate from the Sierra Maestra, Castro, pleased to have a man of Cubela’s caliber, bestowed on him the rank of comandante, the highest rank in Fidel’s army. Cubela and his men even entered Havana three days before Castro completed his triumphal march across Cuba, indeed Cubela was in command of the force that occupied the presidential palace.
For months, he drove around Havana in a grand touring sedan. On a drunken night, “not able to distinguish sufficiently between happiness and the lofty emotions of a maniac, he had a smashup. He killed a young girl.” That death brought back to him the ghost of Blanco Rico. Before long, Cubela was talking to a psychiatrist, who, in his turn—he worked for another revolutionary group—was trying to convince Cubela that the only way to put Blanco Rico’s ghost to rest was to assassinate Fidel Castro. “In Cuba,” said Martínez, “even our psychiatrists are pistoleros.”
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