Cuba on the Verge

by Leila Guerriero

  “Did the Metros sell games or not?”

  “Nobody knows, nobody says. I’ve talked to ballplayers who were in it and no one has said, ‘Yes, I was sold.’ So for me, it’s nebulous. Because I don’t believe that a team that was sold would get to the last day of a championship in the first place. Because no team has to be paid to win, you always want to win.”

  My first outing with my father was to Kendall. I remember the narrow, pretty streets, the low houses, all the same, the pruned little gardens, the garages. It was a little after nine in the morning and we were going at a slow crawl in a Ford pickup, spying those façades of a nearly unhealthy perfection, the roundabouts with their twisted corners, and the bunches of coconuts sticking out above the rooftops.

  Kendall, like all of Miami, was infested with coconut trees, but no one opened the door to us at the first three houses. Manolo would park, go up to the house, ring the doorbell, and wait for one or two minutes, with his hands on his waist or walking around in small circles. Then he would return to the pickup, confused. It seemed like we were on a fool’s errand. At the fourth house, someone opened a window and said no. We took it as progress that someone answered. We hadn’t been at it an hour and everything seemed to be going too slowly for me. We were two Latino emigrants plunging ourselves entirely into the unchlorinated pool of survival. I knew that perhaps it wasn’t that bad, but I also knew that being from Cuba meant being late to the world. Hoping that, with some luck, we could be useful for something. In the first house that gave us permission, there weren’t more than a dozen coconuts, but Manolo reacted with a liquid happiness that nearly dripped.

  “Up!” he said.

  We took out our tools: a wheelbarrow, a cushion, a metal extension rod, and a sharp, curved, serrated knife. We had to be careful not to cut too close to the coconut, because if we took off the top, which was rather fragile, water would come spilling out, and broken coconuts, bled dry, couldn’t be sold. There were many other requirements, but we were desperate neophytes willing to knock down any coconuts we were authorized to knock down. Manolo attached the knife to the end of the rod, extended it, and tried to place the knife in a strategic position amid the cluster of branches, dry leaves, and ripe or about-to-fall-off fruits that make up the always-tangled locks of coconut trees in the tropics. If the knife got stuck, there was no forcing it, just patiently freeing it. It was the only problem that required a certain amount of reflection in a job that was primarily physical. When I placed the first ten coconuts I’d ever collected in my life in the back of the pickup and, leaning over the side of the bed, I compared the space they took up with the space that was left—the work we had done with what remained to be done, my optimism with my laziness—the same feeling ran through me that I imagine runs through novelists after writing the first line of a novel.

  The strategy consisted of knocking down coconuts one by one so as not to ruin them: decapitating them with a neat blow, quick and direct. Then I, the center field apprentice, would play ball with a small cushion in hand. It ended up being pretty amusing thanks to the mental tricks we invented to overcome the roughness of physical work. I was literally fielding, and the easiest thing to do was to invent an imaginary audience. Although for each fielding error, we lost almost a dollar: too much imagination would have been sacrilege.

  Sometimes the coconuts fell in pairs. Or in threes. Or along with an entire branch. I bent over backward—without any luck—in order not to lose a single one. We also had a construction worker’s helmet, but I thought myself agile enough to go without it.

  Once the coconuts were knocked off, I gathered the spoils of our labor in the wheelbarrow and later unloaded them in the pickup truck. In theory, I played more than one role, but my contribution couldn’t be compared—I know from the few times that we switched roles—to the main work, exhausting and rather melancholy if your father is the one doing it, of knocking down coconuts like one possessed. Sometimes seventy in a row, for seven or eight hours, never less. The pain in your shoulders, the cramped neck, the stiffness in your hands, the feeling of being a lamplighter, the creaking that comes from your body as it becomes tense.

  That morning, we were lucky at a couple more houses. A fine and polite woman—we couldn’t tell if she was Cuban or not—allowed us to deal with her three coconut trees, replete with yellow specimens, as we saw fit. Afterward, she offered us water and asked what many others might have asked: how was it that Manolo, a doctor, was knocking down coconuts? That made me feel somewhat ashamed. An unjustified shame, because in Miami, the immigrant lab, everyone viewed it as desirable that people should get ahead however they could. The woman asked if we could also knock down the dry coconuts for her, almost a hundred. Although they weren’t worth anything to us, Manolo agreed. I whispered to him that we should go. He told me we had to do it because later that woman would allow only us access to the coconuts, and although that seemed like a reasonable motive—making a long-term investment—the truth was that it was all about his inability to say no. We had two ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch, drank Gatorade, and continued all afternoon, rather contentedly, until, after having gone unauthorized after a coconut tree located on that piece of grass between the street and the sidewalk that you never know whether it belongs to the city or is private, a neighbor threatened to call the police. As Manolo motioned to me to put the wheelbarrow, the rod, and the harvested coconuts in the pickup truck, he was telling the neighbor that the owner of the house had given us permission. The neighbor accused him of being a liar, because the owner of the house used coconut water for her kidney illness. Then she dialed a number on her cell and we didn’t see anything else because we got in the Ford and screeched around the corner, like in a police chase in the movies.

  In 1986, Arocha felt such pain in his arm that he seriously considered retiring from active sports. Beset by discomfort that had begun in the 1982 Youth World Series—where he pitched five of seven games—he couldn’t hold his own even in provincial championships. He had lost the entire ’83 season, the ’84 and ’85 Selectivas (all-star games), and the speed of his pitches had considerably lessened. “For those trifles, it’s better to retire,” his close friends told him. But later in 1986, after very rigorous training, Arocha made a comeback, recovering the speed in his throws and guaranteeing his entry to the national team.

  “What does it mean to have made it onto the Cuban team?”

  “Especially how I made it, after the injury I had . . . I tried to keep it up and I did, with ups and downs like any athlete, until ’91, when, well . . .”

  “Were you proud?”

  “Of course, how could I not be? To have those four letters on my chest and go out and win, like, for example, in the Baseball World Cup in Italy, ’88.”

  “Is that your best memory?”

  “And one of my greatest disappointments.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was the one who started in both games against the Americans. And in the final, they pulled me from the pitcher’s mound very quickly.”

  “Did that really affect you?”

  “Of course, because I was all in, I was fighting my game, and it was early. I never understood why they took me out. There’s no explanation. They never explain anything.”

  “I think it went very well for us.”

  “It’s better than nothing.”

  “But is it good or not?”

  “As a start, yes, but we have to do more. We have to try to do more than four hundred per day.”

  “Four hundred?”

  “The old coconut gatherers do five hundred and six hundred, although they also have their advantages. People already know them, and at some houses, they save the coconuts for them.”

  “You’re not satisfied.”

  “No, I’m fine. Don’t worry.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Yes, everything is okay.”

  “We’ll get better.”

  “We don’t have experience. And we
have to switch out that rod, it’s too heavy. Details.”

  “We can’t get tangled up with the tall trees.”

  “I think they’re too exhausting.”

  “And we fall behind. For five coconuts from a tall tree, we lose I don’t know how many from somewhere else.”

  “True.”

  “But are you happy?”

  “Yes, I’m happy.”

  We had those conversations. Manolo at the wheel. Me, barefoot, with my feet over the glove box. Sometimes Manolo would look at me: sometimes he slid his hand over my head. Sometimes he didn’t look at me at all and kept his gaze facing forward, focused on the traffic or the airplanes crossing the city or the light change at traffic signals. The highway, gliding beneath us, was like a long dagger, as if instead of moving us forward, it was plunging into us. Just before four in the afternoon, we got to Ovidio’s warehouse, on Thirty-Second Avenue NW and Seventy-Ninth Street in North Miami: a large building with hundreds of boxes stacked up, supermarket carts, a forklift, waste tanks, port-a-potties, and three or four workers who were smoking or hanging around or talking. They also looked like objects: spoiled things that the warehouse never threw out.

  Ovidio had a good business: exhausting, but stable. He was about fifty. Tall, with a receding hairline, a Chaplin-like mustache and a lightning-fast way of speaking, as if his words were a waste of his time and he had to get them out quickly, squeeze them together. Ovidio was always walking away from you. He talked to you while going somewhere else, to show you that you weren’t the most important thing. He immigrated in the nineties, and, since then, he had been buying coconuts from the city’s coconut gatherers and packaging them to sell to a company in New York. I imagined some beach like Coney Island or Rockaway Beach, full of moneyed gringos wanting to sunbathe, slathered in expensive creams, lying on beach chairs at the edge of the sea and drinking, through straws, fresh coconut water from the coconuts we knocked down in a repeating series of scenes, monotonous, all the same, day after day. Manolo going over to my friend’s house to pick me up around eight in the morning; me praying for a flat tire on the Ford, or for a windstorm, anything that would free me from that obligation. Later, me getting dressed, with my haggard face, asking myself why I should help Manolo, why he couldn’t do it by himself. Us getting back on I-95 or on the Palmetto, sometimes for more than an hour, whether we were going north or south—Kendall, Naples, Broward, West Palm Beach—or staying in Hialeah itself. Us, morning fauna, the close cousins of tree surgeons and trash collectors and mailmen. Us stopping in any gas station along the way or beneath the shade of some corner tree to gulp down our snack. Manolo knocking on doors: yes, or no, or later, or I’m not the owner, or take them, or we know what it’s like to make a living, or knock them down but don’t ruin my garden, or leave me a few. Me sullen, or shy, or fed up, or jovial. Manolo defiant, taking shelter behind his glasses, a hat with earflaps to protect him from the sun, a hat like that of a Soviet in enemy territory. Me on the verge of passing out, my lips white, my throat like sandpaper, my hands trembling slightly and those mirages of heat—melted June—reverberating on the sidewalk. Manolo shaking down the trees of closed-up houses; me, helping him, afraid. Manolo expressing regret after a poor day: days without any coconuts, days with four hundred coconuts, mediocre days and bountiful days. Days on which we ran into other coconut gatherers and we sized them up suspiciously or greeted them affectionately. Me slowly exerting myself so that Manolo would work less, rushing to carry something before Manolo could carry it, trying to make my hand or my shoulder arrive before his hand or his shoulder. Me knocking down the coconuts with the rod and Manolo catching them with the cushion. Manolo with his tired muscles and me dreaming of coconuts, coconuts that spoke to me, coconuts that suffered if I let them fall, coconuts that asked us not to take them, mother coconuts crying for their baby coconuts, coconuts that sacrificed themselves, kamikaze coconuts, and broken coconuts that looked at me with languid faces and, shrouded in dignity, asked for a respectful burial.

  At Ovidio’s warehouse, there was enough time for the day’s accounting. The delivery never took less than an hour. The first time, a nineteen-year-old kid who came from Las Tunas, in eastern Cuba, dealt with us. He had left behind his wife and daughter and told us that after a month, he still didn’t know why he had come, that in Cuba he didn’t work, he made a living from selling jewelry, and here, well, he was counting coconuts and boxing them up. The kid, depressed and pensive in the middle of a business led by a practical guy, with evidently little thought for matters of nostalgia, didn’t last too long, so most of the time we dealt with Vladimir, the second in command and the only person whom Ovidio trusted.

  Vladimir was fat and used a wide brace to ease his back pain. We liked him and he liked us. He called Manolo “doctor” and sometimes asked him about pills or some treatment. In reality, Ovidio and Vladimir were very generous. They paid us seventy cents per coconut, ten more than anyone else paid. And Vladimir would suggest which areas to go to, which coconuts we should knock down and which ones we shouldn’t. But even if we knocked down suboptimal coconuts, he would pay half price for them.

  Dry coconuts weren’t any good. Coconuts in which you could hear the water weren’t any good. Big coconuts, the male ones, weren’t any good (and—as we learned later—there is a male coconut in every bunch, one that sacrifices itself for the others to prosper). Coconuts that were too odd, too scaly, were no good. Small coconuts were no good. Coconuts without any top were no good, and beat-up coconuts were worth less than others. Yellow coconuts were technically good, but the business in New York didn’t appreciate them. The best coconuts were medium sized, consistent, and tough, between brown and green in color. Each box held ten coconuts, and broken coconuts were thrown in big plastic bins. The warehouse itself was a giant plastic bin where the city had deposited some of its defective coconuts.

  Everything smelled like Cuba in that place. Memories, people, slang, the spiritual exhaustion dotted with ingenious jokes, and the solidarity of contraband. Sometimes, we stayed longer than necessary. Manolo liked to talk.

  That was why René Arocha decided to emigrate: to not have to explain too many things to himself, especially anything outside of sports. Such as, for example, the two years an uncle of his spent in prison for carrying five dollars at time when it was illegal to have foreign currency.

  “Five hard-won dollars so he could buy his wife some perfume.”

  Or the afternoons on which, exhausted after practice, with a game lined up for that night, he had to spend two hours sitting in the stadium listening to a meeting about some new Communist Youth directive.

  “I was an athlete and that was my free time. I didn’t understand why I had to go to meetings when what I needed was to rest.”

  On July 4, 1991, when the Cuban team had a layover in Miami, Arocha called his father and his aunt, who had been living in that city since his teenage years. He told them that he had time to see them and asked them to come get him at the airport. His father and aunt asked him if he had permission and Arocha told them yes, which was true. They went to get him and, once he was at the house of his relatives, with whom he hadn’t had any contact since 1980, Arocha spoke, for the first time, of the thought he’d been holding on to for years: of going into exile, fleeing. His family ended up taking him in.

  This made him the first Cuban ballplayer to abandon an official team. If there’s a pioneer in the sports exodus from Cuba today, it’s Arocha.

  “What made you emigrate at a time when it still wasn’t common at all?”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be in ’91. It was going to be in ’86. And it should have been in ’79, when I went to Mexico. But it didn’t happen in ’86, for certain reasons.”

  “And why the delay until ’91?”

  “Because I had to find the perfect time and place, but I knew it would happen. Although, when I stayed, I didn’t stay because anyone told me to stay, or because I was going to get millions. I stayed an
d thought my career would end there. I came to be just another citizen.”

  “Why were you so unsatisfied in Cuba?”

  “Because I knew that they were telling me lies. Because everything was one obstacle after another. We couldn’t even spend in Cuba the money that was given to us abroad. We had to spend it wherever we were. And on and on. Everything was a problem, even though we were worth millions of dollars.”

  “When the time came for you to stay in Miami, there was no fear?”

  “No, no fear. Before leaving, I looked at the itinerary, and I knew Miami was the place.”

  “Is it true that you didn’t tell anyone?”

  “No one. Imagine! My ex-wife went to wait for me at the airport in Havana, when everyone else went back.”

  “And what were you thinking then?”

  “When I woke up the next day, the only thing I was thinking was that the bomb had gone off, that was that.”

  “Granma immediately published a hostile piece.”

  “I have it saved. ‘Baseball Player René Arocha Betrayed His Homeland, Seduced by the Miami Mafia,’ et cetera, et cetera.”

  “How does one feel when one reads something like that?”

  “The thing is, I didn’t betray my homeland. I am Cuban, I continue being Cuban. My homeland betrayed me.”

  One day, the power steering belt came loose and we were left stranded in the middle of the highway: the steering wheel was stuck and we had no money for a tow truck, so we had to wait for a friend of Manolo’s to come and pick us up. Another day, the air-conditioning broke. Another day, we forgot to tie down the wheelbarrow and it went flying off right in the middle of the interstate. Another day, we got a flat tire around West Palm Beach and we didn’t have any tools to replace it. Two fat teenagers were playing basketball with one of those portable hoops they have in every house in South Florida. I stood there, watching them; they didn’t invite me to play. We were there for half an hour, until a near-albino from Camagüey, who hadn’t been back to Cuba in over forty years and who had left behind all pigment of life on the island, lent us his tools. At times, the fatigue; the eighty-some-degree heat; my own nature, which shuns sacrifice; and matters of a metaphysical kind—like my tendency to perceive the world as an absolute dump—made me see Manolo as an enemy. But more often than not, even when exhausted, when drenched in sweat, when confused, we could turn on the radio and listen to songs that awoke a certain coded impulse, a messy candor. In other words: gratitude for being alive, a desire to not die.