The Veins of the Ocean

by Patricia Engel

They’d always been a proud communist family. Like everyone else.

  “I didn’t have a father so people said I should think of Fidel as my father,” Nesto says. “And I was a good little pionero. I studied my Russian lessons in school. I wore my blue scarf with pride and couldn’t wait until I got old enough to wear the red one. Like every other kid, I chanted ¡Por el comunismo, seremos como el Che! and I believed those words. I wanted to be like him, so brave and intelligent and charming, a hero who died for his ideals. I was named Ernesto for him, after all. It was the most honorable name you could give a boy in those days. Now it’s the name I’m embarrassed to have. But at least I didn’t get stuck with a Russian name like my sisters and many of my friends.”

  His parents had dutifully abandoned God for the State, as was encouraged. They were exactly the kind of young people the Revolution hoped for—soon bewitched by the teachings of Marx and the doctrine of Lenin, devout believers in the promises the regime made for the future of the island—and thought there was nothing old religions could offer anymore. But Nesto’s grandmother was a follower of La Regla de Ocha and had managed to have him and his sisters baptized Catholic as babies, even if Christmas was still illegal, and eventually paid for him to go to a babalawo and receive his orishas when he was sixteen even though his mother was opposed to it.

  That’s how Nesto learned he’d been claimed by the orisha Elegguá, controller of destiny, and by the warrior Ogún, protector of orphans and orisha of tools and labor. The babalawo divined that Elegguá would show Nesto his path and Ogún, machete in hand, would help him to clear it. From a Santero he received his collares, elekes, beads of devotion, black and red for Elegguá, and black and green for Ogún, which he now wears around his neck so they fall over his heart.

  An iyalocha later told Nesto, through a divination guided by Orunmilá, that his future lay on the other side of the sea and the orishas would help him find a way to cross it.

  She said he was lucky to be claimed by Elegguá, identified as the Anima Sola, the lonely spirit, one of the souls suffering in purgatory, enduring purification by flames until being freed to heaven, because for Nesto there would be struggles too, she warned, but in the end, there would be salvation, and the promise of paradise beyond his dreams.

  There are ways to get here, Nesto tells me, beyond the balsa. A ride on a boat ferrying people across the Florida Straits would have cost an impossible ten thousand U.S. dollars in a peso economy, and he didn’t have anyone abroad who could pay it for him. Even if granted an exit permit, a legitimate visa through the U.S. Interests Section took years to process through waitlists and bureaucratic delays. The rumor was the twenty-thousand-visa quota was more likely filled by white Cubans rather than Afro-Cubans and the only way to move ahead in the line was with bribes.

  “As we say over there, in Cuba one has to wait in line even to die.”

  Even with the long-gone relatives in Miami filing the paper­work for him on the other side, Nesto knew that boys like him—healthy, strong—were rarely given permission to leave, too obvious a risk for immigration, and the aging Revolution needed its youth.

  He still played basketball almost every day on the unpaved, rock-pitted court a few streets from his family’s house in Buenavista, shooting at a backboard with no hoop. One day the priest from the church where Nesto sometimes went for English classes came looking for him. He told Nesto the church’s basketball team had been invited to play in an inter-diocesan tournament in Mexico City.

  Nesto understood what the priest was offering.

  He played the match, helped the church team win, and defected the night of their victory, thanking and saying good-bye to the priest, who also showed Nesto the way to sneak out of the dormitory. He slept on church steps and park benches until he made his way to Matamoros, where he walked across the border to Brownsville, identifying himself as Cuban at the customs office, and was given asylum.

  From there he bused it to Miami, where his father’s eldest brother, who’d fled in the sixties, waited for him at the station, took him to buy clothes, showed him around, and helped him find a job with a friend repairing air conditioners and refrigerators in the bodegas and cafeterias of Sweetwater and Hialeah.

  He made some friends. Guys who taught him how to open a bank account and write a check, taught him about credit and car payments and insurance, and how to use the Internet—things he never had to think about back home. They were guys he would play basketball with on Saturdays at José Martí Park, who spoke the same chabacanería spoken back home, who took him to see bands perform at Cuban clubs, who introduced him to their sisters and other girls also from La Habana—some recently arrived, some who came as children, though they rarely encountered the ones born here to long-settled exiles, those who, when he did meet them, mostly looked down on him for being the son of failed communists, a little Soviet puppet, un recién llegado, a reffy, un cubano más.

  He was supposed to be an exile now, too, but didn’t feel like one.

  Maybe, he says, because he left the greatest pieces of himself back home.

  There were things he liked about Miami: the quimbe and cambalache, the way things could be bartered and traded in daily negocios just as they were back in Havana, a stand-in economy of exchanges and favors, and anything else could be found for cheap at ¡Ñooo! ¡Qué barato!, or the Opa-Locka market and the local pulgueros. But there was much that shocked him: the abundance of electricity, the entire city lit up through the night, where the government doesn’t cut the power with no warning; the excess of American supermarkets, so much of everything, so much going to waste.

  Sometimes he ran into people from home who’d crossed over before him, already settled with new houses and new families, who seemed so content with their lives over here that they didn’t give much thought anymore to all they’d left behind.

  Miami was just as described back home: “Cuba con Coca-Cola.” He liked the sight of fresh paint on buildings and homes, how it seemed there was a factory-fresh car for every person to drive on the smooth paved roads of Miami, lined with palms and working streetlights, everything so new it was as if the whole city came out of a box.

  Even if the beaches were not as beautiful as back home, there were neighborhoods that reminded him of Tarará, a shiny fabricated seaside community where primary school kids were taken for an enchanted fifteen days a year, unaware that the residences they stayed in would eventually house the kids who came to Cuba from Chernobyl to heal, and children like Nesto who played in the fields and bathed in the surf would age into the adolescents who had to work for their education out in the campo. There were neighborhoods in Miami lined with imitation Italian and Spanish villas almost as grand as the palaces lining Quinta Avenida, around Vedado, spread through Miramar and Siboney. If he closed his eyes, he could almost convince himself the air was the same on the continent as it blew in off the Atlantic, but he missed the ruffle of the tropical trade winds, and the thick salty mist wafting in from the Straits and from the Caribbean.

  The cubanía and cubaneo had eased the shock of his arrival, but after a year, he felt alone, adrift in the last generation’s exiles’ secondhand nostalgia for a country that hadn’t existed in over fifty years, and by street corner rants about what had become of their country by those who refused to go witness it as it was now.

  In Cuba, he’d loved to go on long drives to the hills of Viñales and Las Terrazas, to Artemisa, to the beaches beyond Varadero and Matanzas Bay, but gas for the car was expensive, and when things were hard, he went months, even years, without leaving Havana. But once he began making money in this country, enough to start payments on a truck of his own and fill up its tank, he took to the Florida highways, tracing the peninsula, sometimes sleeping on beaches the way he liked to do back home, driving as far north as Virginia, where he saw snow for the first time, then found himself heading farther and farther south, past the edges of the Everglades down to these s
mall islands and, one day, he called his uncle in Miami and told him he’d decided to stay.

  Nesto came of age in the eighties, at the height of what he calls the Soviet colonial era in Cuba, fluent in Russian, practicing military exercises in his school at Ciudad Libertad in case of U.S. bombings, and educated like every other child to serve the State. But he grew disillusioned by the Revoluntion’s inconsistencies; everyone was supposedly equal, but when a distant cousin of his father’s had come to visit from Spain, the family wasn’t allowed to enter the hotel where he stayed. And when that relative sneaked Nesto in, at age twelve—and bought him a chocolate bar in the gift shop, with its kiosk full of candies and snacks Nesto had never seen in his life; and sent him home with a sandwich from the hotel restaurant made with a thick, grainy delicious bread so different from the bland, airy white bread made available to regular citizens, wrapped in aluminum foil he’d never seen before either—he understood that nothing on the island was as it appeared.

  Nesto realized with the taste of that chocolate bar that he’d been hungry all his life, though it would be a few years until he came to know real hunger, he says, with the institutionalized famine that overtook the island when the Soviets pulled out, what ese called “a special period in time of peace.”

  Even the Santeros rationalized the food shortages with the old Yoruba proverb, There is no renewal without decline, and recounted the patakí of how Poverty and Hunger used to walk the earth together, hand in hand, striking in every town as they looked for a place to settle, until the great orisha Obatalá chased them away so that they would have to wander the earth forever. “Poverty and Hunger may have come to visit,” the Santeros said, “but we won’t let them stay.”

  Sure, they were already accustomed to periods of vacas gordas and periods of vacas flacas, but this period was different; now there were no cows at all.

  With the State-run bodegas empty, his entire family growing thinner by the day, Nesto put his ability to hold his breath for several minutes underwater to use and made a spear out of an old antenna and scrap metal with which he and some friends would fish off the Malecón, taking their catch home to their families, and selling what was left over. But the ­police caught on and warned that if they kept at it they’d have bigger problems.

  “How absurd,” he tells me, “that on an island, it’s illegal to fish without a license. Even the creatures swimming in Cuban waters belong to the State.”

  Later, as a young soldier doing his military service, stationed to guard the home of a high official, Nesto witnessed the banquets enjoyed by those in high government ranks, while the people outside El Laguito’s walls starved—food was so scarce that cats and dogs disappeared off the streets and pigeon coops kept on building roofs were, depleted; the terrified yet resigned faces of the young guajira girls brought from their villages to the estate’s metal gates for officials’ entertainment, and the parents who sometimes showed up looking for their daughters, crying to Nesto for mercy until a more senior guard came to scare them off with threats of jail or worse.

  Why, he often asked his mother, hadn’t she or her husband left, taken the family away from the island when they had the chance?

  Because with the Revolution, they’d had more to gain than to lose, she’d reasoned; because it wasn’t right that on their island there could exist such obscene wealth alongside such crushing poverty. And because, under Batista, with nobody safe from being hunted by his police, life was so much worse.

  But why then, Nesto insisted, when the failures of the Revolution became clear, hadn’t they tried to leave later, even on one of the boatlifts? So what if they’d be called gusanos and vendepatrias, shunned by neighbors, even having rocks thrown at them? He insisted to his mother those were things they’d forget in their new life.

  “Ay, mi amor,” she’d said. “It’s hard to leave, and even harder to break up a family. May you never know how hard.”

  He’d been a gifted athlete, and good enough in school that he was tapped to join the young communists of the UJC, which at eighteen would have secured him a carnet del partido and he’d have been a full-fledged Party member, but Nesto refused to join, disappointing his family and making neighbors suspicious.

  After his military service, he could have gone to university to be a lawyer like both his older sisters, or even to be an engineer. He’d passed the entrance exams. But ten miles on a bicycle each day since the camello buses didn’t come out to Buenavista, and so many years of study just to give his life to serving the State, defending laws he didn’t believe in, and earning next to nothing for it? Even his sisters, with all their education, earned just over twenty dollars a month. Nesto wanted no part of it. He’d completed his military service as a young father and newly married, and had a future other than his own to think about now. He was raised to believe a man should serve his country before anything—¡patria o muerte!—but knew he wouldn’t pass that obedience on.

  Everyone had one job the government saw; but another, the job that truly fed and provided, was the job the government didn’t see. He opted to be an obrero and went to a trade school to learn to repair things so at least he could earn some money, that which he’d declare, and that from side jobs which he’d hide, so his family could live better, supplement the food rations of the Libreta de Abastecemiento, perpetually scaled back, the government grocery depleted of just about everything but beans, diluted coffee, stale bread, and maggot-filled bags of rice. Anything else cost extra, and in fula—dollars—not the pesos the locals earned, and was sold in the diplomercados and shopping malls meant for diplomats and foreigners.

  They were poor, like everyone else, but he didn’t want his kids’ bodies to show it with skinny, enclenque legs and rickets, so he did all he could, resolviendo, inventando, to make money for better food, for milk beyond what they were rationed only to age seven.

  “But there are eyes all over the island,” Nesto says. And eventually the neighborhood snitches of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution turned him in for fixing cars—Russian Ladas or discontinued Korean imports left behind by foreigners, when only cars manufactured before 1959 could be bought and sold—to sell for a personal profit.

  After the Cederistas reported him, police arrived at Nesto’s door to arrest him.

  “So you went to jail?” I ask him.

  We’re at the Crescent Key marina watching the fishermen come in with the day’s catch. Nesto wants to buy a couple of fillets to char on the grill behind my cottage, which he helped me clean out and get working again. He says once he has enough cash, he’s going to buy himself a real spear gun, the fancy mechanical kind, and start catching fish himself again. For now, the fish from the marina market will do.

  “Yes. Three times. For three days each. But that’s nothing on the island. Anybody can be arrested for anything. They make honest work a crime. Everyone becomes a criminal because every­thing is illegal.”

  “You weren’t scared?”

  “Not really. Not until the last time when they said if I got arrested again, they wouldn’t let me go. Then I knew they were serious.”

  “What was it like in there?”

  He looks at me with a hint of impatience in his eyes.

  “¿En el tanque? They put me in a big cell with all kinds of people. Some were real delincuentes, thieves, pandilleros, jineteros. Some were guys like me who got turned in for nonsense: a guy who sold mangos from his garden, a tailor who made somebody a suit for his wedding, a baker who sold someone a birthday cake, a guy who bought a microwave.”

  “They can arrest you for buying a microwave?”

  “They watch how much each person spends. Everything is assigned to a name and nobody is allowed to buy more than his share. It’s called Illicit Enrichment.”

  “Where do they put the murderers?”

  He laughs. “Somewhere else. With the rapists, subversives, and spies.”

&n
bsp; I can tell he thinks me naive because of my questions, that maybe he’s shocking or even thrilling me with the intrigue of his time in jail, but really, I’m trying to decide if I should tell him about Carlito.

  The fishermen lay out their fish and Nesto leans over a table picking out a bonito for them to fillet for us. I turn away when the fisherman pulls out the blade to cut off its head and start the skinning and pulling of bones.

  The fisherman with the knife asks if we want to keep the head.

  I say no just as Nesto says, “Of course. The head is the best part. The eyes are what give you wisdom.”

  When we have our wrapped fillets in hand and are headed back to his truck, I tell Nesto, “My brother was in prison.”

  “What did he do?”

  I wait until we’re in the truck, his key in the ignition, to answer.

  It gives me time to rehearse my words in my mind. But there really is only one way to say it.

  “He killed a baby.”

  Nesto pulls the key out and turns to me, but I look away, out the window toward the marina.

  “A baby?”

  “It was his girlfriend’s daughter. He threw her off a bridge into the ocean.”

  Somehow, I believe it doesn’t sound as bad as if he’d stabbed Shayna or shot or even strangled or poisoned her, maybe because Carlito’s public defender put that notion in my mind. We were hoping he’d be charged with voluntary manslaughter, but the prosecutor went straight for murder in the first degree with malice and intent to kill. Carlito pleaded not guilty and his attorney tried to prove to the jury it had been a lapse of sanity, not some premeditated thing, that he hadn’t driven over to Isabela’s that day knowing he would soon end her daughter’s life. The jury didn’t buy it though. I’m not even sure I did.

  I watch the image burn across Nesto’s face in revulsion.

  I always expect people to ask why Carlito did it. But they never do. Once, I mentioned to my mother how I was always prepared to come to my brother’s defense, to say that it had been a momentary psychosis and it wasn’t the real Carlito who committed that terrible crime. But the opportunity never came up. Mami told me that’s because most people believed the only explanation for Carlito taking the life of an innocent child was that he was evil; whether he was born or bred that way didn’t matter. And even she was starting to accept that this might be the truth.