Havana Libre

by Robert Arellano

  At the corner of H y 8 was Mamá. Going to the grave was therapeutic for me. It was a place to be left alone not only by the doctors but by all the strangers around the neighborhood or at school who had heard of my tragedy. Just by stepping into Cemeterio Colón I was inoculated against anyone coming up to me and saying I’m sorry. I closed my eyes and tried to picture Mamá’s face. She wasn’t so different in death from the months leading up to it, losing a fight with cancer and very depressed. Now that she was out of her suffering, I loved her more than ever. There were days, sometimes many in succession, when I wished she had taken me with her.

  At school I was given the nickname “La Mancha.” I developed a crush on a girl in my class but was too young to know what to do about it. She sat directly to my left, and I stole glances all day long. Her light blue eyes: such a beautiful rarity on this island. The girl’s eyes were windows onto another place, somewhere remote from Cuba, somewhere altogether different from this world. During reading time I lifted my book to shield my face and gaze sideways at those arctic eyes while the teacher, an embittered Catholic widower, graded papers with Last Judgment gusto. I taught myself how to speed-read through Edad de Oro. If I scanned the basic gist of the issue in four or five minutes, I was ready to deflect the oral comprehension questions, and then I could spend a good quarter-hour getting lost in the girl’s icy countries. That’s the cold North where my father is, I told myself. I knew winters in Miami weren’t icy, but there was a supermarket with a big machine that made a mountain of snow in the parking lot to entertain the children last Christmas, which is what the gusanos celebrate two weeks before Reyes Magos. Perhaps if I touched the girl’s hand and looked into those eyes, I could travel there to the cold North.

  “¡Manolo! ¿Qué te pasa con el cuello?” The teacher came right down our row and loomed over me like a malicious gargoyle. Suddenly subjected to my classmates’ scrutiny, I didn’t even have the presence to turn away. My fellow students, happy to be distracted from their tasks, began to chatter, and the girl turned to face me. She was annoyed, anxious to get back to her book. She was looking at me for the first time, and there was nothing special registering for her. It was utter indifference I was looking back at. The teacher pinched my cranium and rotated my flushed face toward the book. “Qué bonitos ojos tienes ¿no?” the teacher blurted. The entire class erupted in laughter, except for the girl with blue eyes. As punishment, the teacher made me switch desks with the boy seated in front of the blue-eyed girl. No longer was I just “La Mancha.” Now I was also called “El Enamorado,” and my beloved became “Ojitos Lindos.”

  Near the end of the school year I set myself the task of observing a ghost. When Aurora was asleep one night, I left the house for the place they lived: the necropolis. I boosted myself over the wall and snuck past the gargantuan arch, wherein the groundskeeper lay sleeping. The moon, at its brightest, burned my cheeks while I penetrated deep into the heart of the cemetery to the corner of H y 8. I sat cross-legged against the tomb of Mamá’s neighbor, cracked where tree roots had pushed through, and waited for a ghost to show. The sharp spines of obelisks glowed against the night sky, and my accelerated heart rate made it impossible for me to sleep. Finally, toward morning, I lay on my side to rest.

  I opened my eyes onto a deep blue dawn. A narrow column of light emerged from the earth. My body rigid with sleep paralysis, I couldn’t move to make sense of the apparition. I stared at it for an un-measurable moment and felt no fear or curiosity, just the serene indifference of a hypnotic. Mesmerized, I shut my eyes. They didn’t open again until I was aroused by the sour notes of a funeral procession. The brightness was blinding. A figure stood above me, eclipsing the sun, and when I shaded my eyes I was astonished to see the living spirit of my own longing come to greet me: Ojitos Lindos. “What are you doing here?”

  “My father,” she said, with a jerk of the head in the direction of the funeral. “He’s the one in the box.” Her soft voice betrayed no emotion, only the indifference of a child before the drama of death. “What about you?”

  I sat up and squinted at the sky. The sun had already risen above the tombs. I was embarrassed to admit I had been trying to see a ghost, so I said, “Visiting my mother.” It occurred to me that my mother and her father were both ghosts. They were alike, Mamá and Ojitos Lindos’s father. I stood up and flicked the straw from my hair. “I’m sorry I caused you such trouble in school.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They called you names.”

  “They called you names too.” She looked hard at me. Burning, wishing I hadn’t reminded her, I looked away. “Well, don’t you want to see?” she said.

  “See what?”

  “My eyes.” I looked up and Ojitos Lindos glared back at me. Nobody had ever looked at me in quite that way. She was not staring at the mark. She looked at me and saw me, the real me, not La Mancha. With the big blemish on my cheek, people rarely looked me in the eye, but here in the necropolis with Ojitos Lindos nothing came between. I gazed straight through the light blue of her eyes to the brightening sky behind. The color was the same. “I have to go,” she said. “My mother will send my uncle searching for me.”

  When I returned to the house nobody asked where I had been. The block was buzzing with news of the occupation at the Peruvian embassy, and Aurora spent all day in front of the television. On Monday Ojitos Lindos wasn’t in school. Vacations were nearing, and her mother had arranged for her to stay at home in Oriente during their time of mourning. In the weeks after the fiasco at the Peruvian embassy, the port of Mariel became choked with boats from Florida picking up gusanos. A wealthy cousin sought Aurora out and took her to Miami to prove something, perhaps just that he had become wealthy. At the end of the school year, a neighbor took me to the bus terminal, where I was packed off to Pinar del Río to spend the summer with my father’s family.

  END OF EXCERPT

  More about Havana Lunar

  Finalist for a 2010 Edgar Award

  “In the weeks before Hurricane Andrew sweeps down on Cuba in 1992, Dr. Mano Rodriguez is caught up in intrigue in this thoughtful, lushly detailed neo-noir.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Arellano is masterful in weaving both the physical and the emotional into a story that everyone can relate to in some way, regardless of geography and politics.” —Multi Cultural Review

  “Cuban-American Arellano sets his noir thriller in Cuba just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when a divorced and out-of-favor doctor takes on the protection of a teenaged prostitute, quickly discovering that the violence of the underworld is just below the surface.” —Globe and Mail (Canada)

  “A sad, surreal, beautiful tour of the hell that was Cuba in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The writing is hypnotic, the storytelling superb. Havana Lunar is perfect.” —Tim McLoughlin, author of Heart of the Old Country

  “Written with passion and vision and with a clear, unflinching eye, Robert Arellano’s Havana Lunar breaks new ground. It is not a Cuban American novel but a Cuban novel written in English. In it the Cuban underworld of chulos and jineteras is revealed and the uber-world of political bosses and apparatchiks unmasked. I am certain that Havana Lunar will find a wide and enthusiastic readership.” —Pablo Medina, author of The Island Kingdom

  “Robert Arellano’s book is a hypnotic trip into another world, a place we are hardly ever allowed to go—Castro’s Cuba . . . It’s as if Balzac meets Philip K. Dick, for Arellano’s Cuba is a whole other planet to us, one we definitely need to know more about . . .” —Abraham Rodriguez, author of South by South Bronx

  One hungry, hallucinatory night in the dark heart of Havana, Mano Rodriguez, a young doctor with the revolutionary medical service, comes to the aid of a teenage jinetera named Julia. She takes refuge in his clinic to break away from the abusive chulo who prostituted her, and they form an unlikely allegiance that Mano thinks might save him from his twin burdens: the dead-end hospital assignment he was delegat
ed after being blacklisted by the Cuban Communist Party and a Palo Monte curse on his love life commissioned by a vengeful ex-wife. But when the pimp and his bodyguards come after Julia and Mano, the violent chain-reaction plunges them all into the decadent catacombs of Havana’s criminal underworld.

  Inspired by fifty years of Cuban noir, from the Cold Tales of Virgilio Piñera to Reinaldo Arenas’ Before Night Falls, Arellano’s Havana Lunar intertwines an insider testimony on the collapse of socialist Cuba with a psychological mystery that climaxes in the eye of Hurricane Andrew.

  Havana Lunar is available in paperback from our website and in bookstores everywhere. The e-book edition is available wherever e-books are sold.

  Also by Robert Arellano and available from Akashic Books

  Curse the Names

  One of Deckled Edge Books's "5 Books With Diverse Perspectives You Can Read Today"

  "In this unsettling mix of noir and paranormal obsession . . . Arellano displays a sly, Hitchcockian touch." —Publishers Weekly

  "Arellano pulls off the not-inconsiderable feat of making the disintegration of his hero more compelling than the end of the world as we know it." —Kirkus Reviews

  "Arellano's taut prose [is] a trip into the mind of a man on the edge of delirium, piecing together a puzzle at the expense of his marriage and his sanity." —AARP

  "Arellano writes with pure movement and action . . . Curse the Names does exactly what Hitchcock and The Twilight Zone did so well. It takes the ordinary, the benign and relatable and turns it into a fast-paced romp with unexpected events and realizations at every turn. Don't be surprised if you start this book and don't look up again until you're finished. Though its release has come at the doorstep of 2012, Arellano has definitely earned a late addition to my best books of 2011." —Ryan W. Bradley, The Nervous Breakdown

  "Readers, fasten your seat belts for this one. Arellano's novel is a dizzying Thompsonian concoction of noir crime thriller and alternately nightmarish and comic surreal psychodrama, spiced up with a heaping handful of local northern New Mexico flavor." —Albuquerque Journal

  "Curse the Names reads like a top-notch thriller. Arellano is a master at mining the psychological landscape of his characters—the unique and in some cases downright eccentric subcultures of northern New Mexico: the dope-growing pariah ex-hippies, the brainy scientists of Los Alamos who've bartered their souls for big salaries, and the mercenary, self-medicating professionals who flock around them to feed off their scraps. Alternating between the hilarious and the dreamlike, the novel is imbued the sense of foreboding inherent to Los Alamos' infamous 'gift' to mankind." —George Mastras, author of Fidali's Way

  "The nightmare intensity to Arellano's prose gets under your skin. You won't want to turn the lights out after reading it." —Charles Ardai, Edgar Award winner

  High on a Mesa in the Mountains of New Mexico, a small town hides a dreadful secret. On a morning very soon there will be an accident that triggers a terrible chain reaction, and the world we know will be wiped out.

  James Oberhelm, a reporter at Los Alamos National Laboratory, already sees the devastation, like the skin torn off a moment that is yet to be. He believes he can prevent an apocalypse, but first James must escape the devices of a sensuous young blood tech, a lecherous old hippie, a predator in a waking nightmare, and a forsaken adobe house high away in the Sangre de Cristo mountains whose dark history entwines them all.

  A massive bomb is ticking beneath the sands of the Southwest, and time is running out to send a warning. James has to find a way to pass along the message—even if it ruins him.

  Curse the Names is available in paperback from our website and in bookstores everywhere. The e-book edition is available wherever e-books are sold.

  Fast Eddie, King of the Bees

  “Fast Eddie is a down-and-out and underground fable. It’s a tight close-up, mile-a-minute monkey-cam, filled with more wordplays and puns than an Eminem rap.” —Arthur Nersesian, author of The Fuck-Up

  “A lively and imaginative 21st-century parody of the Victorian novel of the foundling in search of his true parents, complete with comically elaborate twists and turns of plot, broad social satire, and a rich cast of characters. Fast Eddie’s a lot of fun.” —Robert Coover

  “Robert Arellano leads us through a maze of playful language and hairpin plot twists to a realm where myth mutates like cells bombarded by radiation—all with a showman’s touch for making the familiar world seem strange and a strange world vivid.” —Stacey Richter, author of My Date with Satan

  An abandoned child hustles on the streets of a dystopic, near-future Boston in the aftermath of the Great Devaluation—squatters have turned the tunnel system into an underground hive known as Dig City. In an elaborate search for his unknown parents, Eddie narrates through several levels of deception: street performer, pickpocket, adoptee, casino employee, and finally commander of the subterranean revolution. Fast Eddie is a convoluted Oedipal adventure blending low-brow scenarios with high-art diction, reminiscent of Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and Edmund White.

  With the publication of Fast Eddie, Akashic Books launches the Akashic Urban Surreal series. Inspired by the shifting social boundaries in underground classics such as O’Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces and Nersesian’s Manhattan Loverboy—and echoing the achievements in imagination of magic realism—this series invites readers to glimpse worlds that are similar to their own, but with margins and rules that evolve . . . and devolve.

  Fast Eddie, King of the Bees is available in paperback from our website and in bookstores everywhere. The e-book edition is available wherever e-books are sold.

  Don Dimaio of La Plata

  “A former student of Robert Coover, Arellano has created a brilliant novel of political satire based on an actual mayoral stint in Providence, RI . . . Recommended for all fiction collections.” —Library Journal

  “Fear and loathing with Don Quixote at your side! Herein another savage journey to the heart of the American dream—but with sabor and saber latino.” —Ilan Stavans, author of Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language

  “This book is like a good fistfight: You get punched and kicked but you still want more.” —Daniel Chavarría, author of Adios Muchachos

  “I hope that the author is not killed for writing this book. A municpal fornicator (pot) shines a waterfire light deep into the more-than-half-full actions of a civil servant (kettle). So between the writer and his protagonist, a new meaning of ‘black’ power arises.” —Will Oldham, Palace Brothers

  “Robert Arellano is that rare thing: an exceptional creative talent perfectly in tune with his own rapidly changing times.” —Robert Coover, author of The Adventures of Lucky Pierre

  You’re walking along the road in La Plata when the fog rolls in. Giant billboards hulk close above while the lights of the city are blotted out one by one. A black limo with the #1 license plate pulls up out of the pea soup and the driver, a goon in a trooper uniform, says, “Get een.” The back door opens and there he is, all sharkskin suit and slick toupee, kicked back on the leather seat and grinning in a horizontal mirror: Mayor Donald “Pally” Dimaio. High up in the mist you hear an ape-like shriek: Ook ook ai ai ai! The engine is running. “Well, buddy,” says Mayor Dimaio, holding out a rolled-up hundred. “You want some of this?”

  Take a bribe and a ride with La Plata’s favorite rogue politico through a tripped-out town of strip clubs and drug dens where the heirs of Abraham Beige, original pilgrim, rub shoulders with gun-waving goodfellas who steal their lines from ’90s gangster flicks. La Plata is a city for sale, and whether it’s a job as a cop or a million-dollar contract you want, Don Dimaio will show you the way.

  Don Dimaio of La Plata is available in paperback from our website and in bookstores everywhere. The e-book edition is available wherever e-books are sold.

  Robert Arellano is the award-winning author of six previous novels including Curse the Names, Fast Eddie, King of the Bees, and Don Dimaio of La Plat
a. His nonfiction title Friki: Rock and Rebellion in the Cuban Revolution, will be released in 2018. He lives in Oregon. Havana Libre is the standalone sequel to his Edgar- nominated Havana Lunar. Author photo by Jake Hostetter.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2017 by Robert Arellano

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61775-583-5

  eISBN-13: 978-1-61775-601-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936109

  First printing

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  Ballydehob, Co. Cork, Ireland

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