Havana Libre

by Robert Arellano

  She says, “Pa’ cuando tú vuelvas todavía no hay niño hasta dentro de seis meses.” When you return there won’t be any baby, not for six more months.

  I draw a breath. “Of course not, but we will start looking at your options when I get back.”

  She walks me to the service entrance in silence. In the back shadows of the Havana Libre, Mercedes says, “Nos vemos pronto.”

  Walking away, I turn and see she is looking after me. Guajira, you are family to me. Te conozco, pinareña Mercedes. I will come back from this conference.

  Part II

  Manolo en Miami

  MARTES, 9 SEPTIEMBRE

  The once-daily flight from Havana to Miami departs at 7:30 a.m. The immigration agent inspects my passport and permiso de salida and gives them a bored stamp, and then the security agent checks my bag. All I take is a carry-on with four pairs of socks, two pairs of black pants, three pairs of underwear, three black T-shirts, and a toothbrush. Tucked beneath the shirts are my medical papers, along with the invitation letter from the American doctor and the conference program that accompanied it. I’ll get razors in Miami. “¿Cómo te vas a llevar maquinillas plásticas a la Yuma,” Yorki taunted, “si hasta las máquinas chinas sin filo cuentan el doble en la Habana?” He was right. Even dull Chinese razors cost twice as much in Havana.

  When I finally get through security, the salida does not matter anymore. I could take the token paper Gonzalez gave me and toss it in the trash, but I do not. However worthless it has just become, it will be my souvenir.

  I get a window seat. Cóño, pero la Habana is beautiful from above! The bay a sparkling jewel, I see where the name of my medical case comes from: the inverted contour of Havana Bay is shaped like my lunar. I see the city below, identify the Havana Libre, and think about Mercedes and the possibility of something better for this city.

  The guajiro sitting next to me, an old Cubano on a first-time visit to an exile sister and a half-dozen nephews and nieces he’s never met, wonders aloud how long the flight will take. “About forty minutes,” I tell him.

  I look out the window at the Florida Straits and try to distract myself from the overwhelming unknown by thinking in English. Every Cuban’s exile is solitary and unique. Even on a raft full of family, each person makes the crossing individually, and in the act of abandoning la patria and sailing ahead to face the unknown, everyone is alone. It is a supremely egoistic act. The father is thinking one thing: I will make a better life for my wife and children; I will get a job that pays in dollars; I will have a car, and a TV, and money to go out drinking. All the altruistic excuses about doing it for family cannot conceal that, at heart, all our motives are ultimately selfish. To my knowledge, nobody ever tried to construct a homemade raft to go back to Cuba.

  In the airplane I take out the twenty-dollar bill Yorki gave me and the fifty from Emilio. It is not that I think customs won’t let me carry them in. It is myself I do not trust with the money. If it is in my pocket, I will lose it, or in my ignorance of American exorbitance throw it away on the wrong basura. Como dijo Yorki, I’ll probably get ripped off like some asshole. I take both bills, fold them together, and slip them beneath my right heel into the lining of my shoe. This seems like the right place not to lose it, with what I am about to go through. It makes me feel better to have an emergency fund stashed away somewhere sweaty and secure. And it makes me feel superstitious that the twenty is from Yorki, the perennial Habanero, as if carrying it on my person has talismanic powers to ensure my safe return.

  The Cubano sitting next to me watches. “Will they take away our money?”

  “No, I just don’t trust myself not to lose it.”

  He does the same with his own small collection of crumpled fives and ones.

  I fall asleep and miss the descent into Miami, but the guajiro shakes me awake just in time to see the runway coming up under the wing. Off the jetway at Miami International Airport, there are televisions everywhere: beautiful, thousand-dollar, Japanese televisions; screens so slender you want to look behind them. How can they be so slim and still show all those brilliant colors?

  I will have to go through customs before getting on the connecting flight to Tampa. Of course, I will not be getting on the connecting flight to Tampa, but the drill would be the same either way in order to get out of international arrivals. I will have to keep playing a part, or rather I’ll be playing a new part. It occurs to me that I will have to play multiple parts, and now I am approaching a moment of transformation between parts which all exilados who come by air must play: from emigrant to immigrant, from tourist to exile.

  Whether you are a trained professional attending a conference in a high-tech field, or an overqualified but uncertified specialist seeking a green card; whether you are someone hitting the beaches and spending a few hundred dollars at a hotel, or a refugee about to become a problem for immigration and naturalization: you go from playing one part to be allowed to leave Cuba, to playing another role that will allow you to enter los Estados Unidos.

  My passport and visa are all in order, but approaching US customs my heart pounds all the same. The lines are short and move steadily, and as I approach the booth I notice that there are mirrors in all the corners. Even when it comes to examination, these Americanos are expensive.

  The unauthorized copies of my medical records are in my bag, and for the first time since Pérez handed them to me in the back of the Toyota, I realize that it is no longer incriminating for me to be carrying them. Just like the permiso de salida does not matter anymore. Havana has no more authority over me. I am free—almost.

  The counter is at eye level, and the man in the customs booth stands on a platform that makes him several feet taller. The little steel slot in the plexiglass is large enough to slip a passport through, but not to poke a gun barrel. “Plan on making any connections?” he says in English.

  “Tampa.” I am curious about his accent, which is Spanish but not Cuban, and nervousness makes me garrulous. I ask him, “¿De dónde es usted?” To my surprise, he tells me he is Central American, a naturalized Nicaraguan, and the United States customs agent from Nicaragua will make use of this detention by imparting a brief English lesson.

  “What is the purpose of your travel?”

  I say in berry good Ingles: “I am here for a conference at the invitation of Professor B.A. Shapiro of the Tampa Medical Extension of the University of Florida.”

  “How long are you planning on staying?”

  “I intend to return to Havana on the fifteenth of September.”

  “No, you don’t.” I am speechless. This is a welcome that Caballero and his men never prepared me for. “Mira, yo lo he visto todo. I have seen it all. What’s going to happen is you’re gonna ask the medical school in Havana for your records, and you ain’t gonna get ’em, so you won’t be able to take the Florida state exam, mucho menos pass the puto examen. Mira, it’s your funeral, compadre. But if I were you, I would take your time to declare your intent to stay. I‘ll give you an extra day, until the sixteenth.” He stamps me seven days. He has seen it all.

  At the baggage inspection, American dogs sniff my pockets and million-dollar X-ray machines expose the contents of my bag. Sweating in the air-conditioned international terminal, I know I conceal something more dangerous than the contents of my carry-on: I harbor hidden intent. But I get through easily. It is Tuesday at nine a.m., and I am in los Estados Unidos.

  Instead of turning left toward domestic departures, I head right to parking and ground transportation. In my mind I’m saying, like a prayer, Dear Doctor Shapiro, please accept my deepest regrets, but I will not be able to fulfill my acceptance of your invitation to attend the conference in Tampa . . . Knowing that I will neither write nor call him. No such courtesy is permitted of me.

  I wait to make the phone call. Eduardo suggested that I first make a survey of José Martí Park. At ground transportation I find the right bus route for Little Havana and take the twenty from the wad in my
shoe to buy a two-dollar ticket for the 42 bus to Calle 8. I ask the cashier for change for the pay phone, and I decide that I am comfortable enough to carry eighteen dollars in bills and coins in my pants pocket, the back left one with the button.

  Miami is an endless ocean of mammoth buildings and their shadows, surrounded by great migrations of cars. The buses here are much better than the camellos in Havana. It is clean, has air-conditioning, and I have two seats all to myself. Then I look out the window and know I have descended into the belly of the beast. The sigil of the devil is everywhere: dollar signs wink at me from every window, doorway, and sidewalk clothing rack. The electronic stores’ prices all have five digits that always end in .99: JUST $199.99! JUST $279.99! JUST $999.99! What about Yorki’s order for twenty-dollar Nikes? Olvídalo, forget it. In bright glass storefronts shouting SAVE! and DEALS! even the knockoffs start at $59.99. I see a Ferrari racing its engine at a red light and rattling the windows of the sushi restaurants. I see more Porsches than I can count. I see a real Maserati. It peels around the corner with a shriek. There goes one hundred Cuban doctors’ lifetime fortunes on four wheels. I see men walking in under a great, lighted marquee for a strip club that announces, NUDE! NUDE! NUDE! and I cannot believe the pictures they show on the street.

  It takes under an hour to go the five miles to Little Havana. At José Martí Park, the people are tan and well fed and their clothes are clean. There is one man in a torn T-shirt fishing in the river, and a rico wearing a Polo shirt and Gucci sunglasses walks up to interact with him. I look out over the river at the sun climbing between the skyscrapers downtown and eavesdrop on their exchange.

  “How are they biting?” el rico says in Spanish, and it occurs to me that although this is America, the expectation of one stranger approaching another here is that Spanish will most likely be the common tongue.

  “Más o menos,” says the ragged fisherman without looking up from his idle line.

  The rich man of the people takes this as an opportunity to recount aloud to anyone in the park who can hear about the marlin he caught on a fishing excursion the other day, one assumes with the dual objective of at once boasting of his own prowess as a sportfisherman, and of edifying the poor peasant trying to catch a simple bonefish—and nobody begrudges him the entitlement.

  Their mouths emanate the familiar accents and cadences of Cuban Spanish, but everything else about them is so different that it seems I am on another planet from Havana. Instead of talking about apartment swaps, prostitution, and how to find some scrap to eat, they shout about skimpy swimsuits, how the fishing is, and what they have had or are about to have to eat and drink. The rich are so rich they do not comprehend their own solipsism when they brag about their privilege to a worker of the lower classes. Solipsism. It reminds me of the second bomber. He is out there somewhere, eating, breathing, planning the destruction of innocent life, and somehow reconciling his conscience to his decision. The ultimate egomaniac.

  I take in the surroundings at José Martí Park. In several weeks or several months I will have to come back here. I am thinking—I have to suppress laughing cynically to avoid calling attention to myself—here I am, planning like a spy. At the edge of the park I find a pay phone. I look at the phone number Emilio gave me and prepare to make the most awkward telephone call of my life. I put in the coins and push the buttons. The connection comes through instantly, and for a moment I am impressed by this country, but it rings a long time and I am about to give up.

  “Farmacia Rodriguez. ¿Aló?”

  “¿Por favor, puedo hablar con Juan Rodriguez?”

  A crisp “¿Quién habla?”

  I can tell it is not my father. Rather than commanding the authority of a former physician in Cuba who now owns his own pharmacy in Miami, the accented voice betrays the customary paranoia of the Miami Cuban combined with some of the petty suspicion of an underling whose duty is to answer the phone and triage calls by order of importance.

  “Me llamo Manolo Rodriguez.”

  A pause on the other end of the line. If there is any recognition, it is only a dim connection that the same surname could mean a cousin or other relative, if it isn’t just a joke or a coincidence.

  The sycophant says, “Un minuto, por favor.”

  Not nearly a minute, maybe six endless seconds later, a voice says, “¿Quién es?” These two words sound so much like Emilio and, in younger days, Abuelo, that I know it has to be him. He asks who is speaking.

  “It’s Manolo Rodriguez calling.”

  “¿Cómo?”

  “Tu hijo Manolo.”

  Silence on the line. I am so used to CubaTel that after a full fifteen seconds I believe we must have been cut off, but I finally hear his response and know that America’s phone lines have not let us down: “Cóño.”

  “Estoy en Miami.” There is another long silence. “¿Me oyes todavia?”

  “Sí.”

  I say, “Soy médico.”

  “Yes, I heard you became a doctor. When did you get here?”

  “This morning. I was invited to a conference.”

  “Where did you find the number for my pharmacy?”

  I say what I know I must—“Primo Emilio got it from Abuela”—adding, like someone who might never see his beloved grandfather again, “I was in Pinar last weekend to say goodbye to her and Abuelo.”

  My father, like someone who could care less that he’ll never see his own father again, says,“How is he? Still taking the water?”

  “He’s well, and yes, un Acuático hasta la muerte.” An Acuático until death.

  He lets that hang on the line. Maybe he is not completely immune to the discomfort of hearing about family he hasn’t spoken with in two decades, although I cannot verify this without seeing his mannerisms in person. “Well,” he says, “would you like to meet for lunch?”

  To meet my father for the first time? But for the assignment, I am not sure there is any part of me that actually wants to. “Yes. When?”

  “Today, if you’d like. Say eleven thirty. That way we’ll beat the second wave.”

  The second wave: the exiles who left Cuba in the 1960s. “Okay,” I say. “Name the place.”

  “How about Habana Vieja? That’s on Calle 8. You think you can find it?”

  “No problem.”

  It’s hard to tell over the phone whether I hear a chuckle or a sigh, and he hangs up with something I never thought I’d hear from this man: “Hasta luego.”

  I am not sure that I will get used to this.

  * * *

  I stand in front of the restaurant at the appointed time, eleven thirty . . . to beat the second wave, but he is not there. I look inside. Other diners who shared my father’s idea of getting in and out before the second wave crowd the tables in nice suits, with Ray-Bans on their heads, Rolex watches on their wrists, and beepers and cell phones in their hands. It is louder than any restaurant I have ever been in, louder than any party I have been to with one exception: the end of my fiesta in Viñales when Manolito started singing.

  The hostess is kind. She does not stare at my lunar or down at my cheap shoes. Looking me in the eye, she tells me I may sit in the waiting area before leading a couple back to the dining rooms. Her pants are of a cut and cloth that have yet to make it to Havana, or maybe that Cubanas saw coming but nevertheless have foresworn for their favored Lycra. And I, no novice at detecting the exemplary culo de Cubana, am nevertheless mindful of my impoverishment trying to visualize the possibilities through the rushed cut of slacks and scrubs around the pediátrico: it has nothing on this stretchy black fabric, probably synthetic, but not shiny like Lycra, and the fine specimen tolling like a cathedral bell.

  Enter a man in white guayabera and tan chinos whose features resemble not his nephew Emilio but instead his father, mi abuelo. He is my father, Juan Rodriguez, and he is fat. He looks at my lunar and takes it in along with the rest of me. If he thinks I am handsome, he doesn’t let it show. I am a version of him thirty years youn
ger and a hundred pounds lighter, with a large blemish under the left eye. I take note of the broken capillaries in his cheeks. It could just be rosacea, but I doubt my father would leave that undiagnosed and untreated. I estimate twenty or twenty-five years of heavy drinking.

  I expected the similarities to Manolito and Abuelo, but now, no matter how much I thought I prepared myself for this moment, the strangest thing is actually believing it is him, this father I never met. I had to bury him. Until this moment, I have not believed it impossible that I would show up and learn he is dead. It was someone’s farce, someone in the family: those letters from the early years, never sending pictures. Now there is no question.

  The actual fact of finding him alive makes me feel so uncomfortable that I focus on the hostess. She takes two menus the size of washboards and leads us through the crowded restaurant. Her swagger and pace transfix my father and myself alike. Charmed snakes, we follow.

  I watch how my father walks, touching tables and doorframes as he passes—and I can see Abuelo twenty years younger. It is unmistakable: that’s the Rodriguez walk. The hostess does not look back, and that makes us tail her swiftly through the crowded dining rooms. Brushing by so many well-dressed elbows and shoulders feels self-aggrandizing, exhilarating, and a little dangerous. We have money. This is America. We are going to eat a good lunch.

  On every wall in each room there are murals and dioramas depicting cartoonish, prerevolutionary street scenes of Old Havana. In South Florida, exiles have created a cardboard Cuba. Little Havana is a Disney attraction complete with streets, restaurants, and even a country club named after their nostalgic version of the lost island. It is a labyrinth of longing that envelops every cavity of the restaurant. The hostess stops at an empty table for two along the wall and lays the huge menus at the place settings, not even stopping her delightful pendulum, just pivoting while chirping, “Buen provecho,” and then she’s already on her way back to her station to seat the next early birds. In a breath a busboy is there with a pitcher of ice water.