by Jose Latour
“Same to you, Ms. Berta,” turning the handle.
Back in bed, lights off, Steil found himself unable to loosen up and sleep. Once again he was experiencing the mental state he had gone through twenty-eight hours earlier in Miami. He reviewed over and over what the rival duos had said, tried to make connections and guess what lay behind the layers of verbosity. Hart and McLellan had strong-armed him into collaboration, and he hated that, but they knew this was going to happen and were straightforward about their goal—go there, someone will approach you, hear what they want from you, agree to do it, then report to us. The two Cubans had done the opposite: sweet-talk him into cooperation and conceal the reason for it behind a load of baloney. However, it seemed they were not aware that the FBI wanted to know what the State Security was up to.
Five or six months earlier, Steil recalled, a senior analyst in the Defense Intelligence Agency had been arrested and charged with spying for Cuba. In 1998, twelve Cubans who had settled in Miami in the early nineties were arrested and accused of operating a spy ring. In 2001, five of them were given long prison sentences. Both cases had been extensively covered in the U.S. media, and Steil had conscientiously read numerous articles about them and watched many pieces in the evening news.
While living on the island, he had dismissed the much-touted capacity of Cuban Intelligence to penetrate foreign governments and anticommunist organizations as party-approved pablum spoon-fed to unsuspecting citizens. It seemed he had been wrong. Obviously, the intelligence and counterintelligence organizations of both countries were waging a cloak-and-dagger war and he had been caught in the crossfire. In the afternoon he had felt like Santa Claus; now he felt like a sitting duck.
He tossed and turned until two, when he lost consciousness.
Four
Having overslept, Elliot left his hotel room a little after 10:00 A.M. on Monday morning. He wore the faded jeans, white short-sleeved shirt, and old black lace-up shoes he had brought with the express purpose of blending into the crowd. Elliot placed the previous evening’s bizarre interview on the back burner and, skipping breakfast, asked the parking valet for his rental. He admired April in all its glory: low seventies, cloudless sky, cool breeze blowing from the east, brilliant sunshine. He drove to his old neighborhood listening to Radio Reloj. The news of the day was that president Chaviano had been reinstated in Venezuela. He parked the car three blocks away from Sobeida’s apartment building and ambled over, searching for changes.
Everything seemed to be in the same sorry state or more dilapidated. The exception was a recently refurbished private home, with a two-toned, highly polished ’56 Chevrolet Bel Air in mint condition and a ’98 gray Citroen in the driveway. He had no recollection of the gleaming white grilles that now secured its doors and windows. Maybe the head of the household made a living in the tourism industry, or relatives abroad paid for everything. Perhaps the residence had been purchased by an artist who performed or sold works of art abroad, or by someone operating a profitable private business. A foreign sugar daddy or mommy who had fallen under the spell of a Cuban woman or man might be footing the bills. Whatever the source, Elliot felt sure that (1) its dwellers were secretly envied, (2) the block’s informers kept them under surveillance, and (3) many would say the proprietor flaunted his or her wealth.
Fifteen or twenty years earlier, Elliot had concluded that socialist equality, theoretically conceived as an upward spiral toward communal riches, in practice became a collective nosedive into poverty. Such dismal failure, he had observed, generated envy—and its twin brother, severe criticism—toward those who prospered. It was considered irrelevant if an individual’s well-being took place within the existing political framework or independently of it. The high-ranking officials who were given the comfortable homes abandoned by the fleeing upper and middle classes in the sixties, rode in new cars, and got supplementary rations of food were rebuked as sternly as those who enjoyed the same standard of living with money coming from relatives abroad or other legal sources. The overwhelming majority of Havana’s dispossessed felt they had been cheated into swallowing the equality pill. The consolation prize for stupidity seems to be criticism of the smartest, he had resolved.
“Teacher?”
Elliot slowed down, half turned, looked back, then stopped. He frowned at the swaggering young man who had passed him an instant before and was now eyeing him with a doubtful expression on his face. The muscular, swarthy, beardless, baby-faced hulk struck him as being eighteen or nineteen years old. He had never taught English to students under fifteen and, having departed in 1994, the youngest in that year’s class now were in their mid-twenties.
“Are you talking to me?” De Niro–like.
“Didn’t you use to live in that apartment building,” the young man, pointing with his arm, “many years ago?”
“Eight years ago, yes.”
“I live there. And I remember you.”
“Oh, you do? Well … thanks. And you are?”
“I’m Lemar,” proffering a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt.
Elliot took it feeling senile. The four-foot-tall, ten-year-old kid had turned into a Samson capable of knocking him out cold with a slap in the face.
“Coñó, Lemar, how many ration cards you got?” It had been a popular late-twentieth-century Cuban joke played on tall, beefy guys and gals. Lemar answered with a sheepish grin. He seemed good-natured, as were most men capable of crushing almost any opponent in the first thirty seconds of a fight.
“How’s your grandfather?”
“He died.”
“Oh, sorry to hear that.”
“You know, three-pack-a-day guy.”
“Yeah, I remember. And your grandmother?”
“She’s okay. Are you on your way to say hello?”
“Well,” scratching his head, “yes, in fact I am.”
Lemar nodded and hesitated, not sure whether asking what he wanted to ask was an indiscretion. “Word is you sailed to Miami on a raft. Is it true?”
“Yeah. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, though. You in college?”
“Nah. I dropped out of high school. Then the army drafted me. I’m on a forty-eight-hour leave.”
“It’s still two years, right?”
“Yep.”
“Used to be three in my time.”
“Fuck.”
“And you’ll be discharged in …?”
“Twenty-one months and five days.”
Steil raised his eyebrows and shook his head compassionately. “Well, I guess there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“I could do something about it, if somebody told me how to make a raft and sail to Key West.”
“Don’t think about it, Lemar. It’s madness. Well, I guess I shouldn’t keep you any longer. Take care.”
“You too, teacher. Bye.”
Lemar was the first of five former neighbors that Elliot bumped into before entering his old building. People seemed genuinely glad to see him, wanted to know how he was doing. Where had he settled? Had he married? Was he still a teacher? What did he do for a living there? He was deliberately shy and unassuming in his answers. He worked at a Miami trading company, made a decent living, was still divorced, had come to visit relatives in Santa Cruz del Norte and friends in Havana. When he knocked on Sobeida’s door, it was a quarter to twelve.
Contrary to expectations, she neither shouted loudly nor laughed merrily. She did gasp, embrace him, kiss him, and then cry and cry and cry. Holding her, he felt her ribcage. Sobeida had lost fifteen or twenty pounds, which seemed strange: He had sent her enough money to feed herself decently, maybe even lavishly. She appeared older than he expected her to look as well. How old was she? he wondered. Sixty-something. She had dissolved her childless, common-law marriage in the early eighties, both her parents had died in the town in which they had been born—Limonar, in the province of Matanzas—in the same decade. Sobeida was an undereducated, lonely woman who tried to brighten up her days b
y memorizing and repeating the city’s latest political jokes.
When she regained composure, they sat on the couch, and Steil learned from his friend that she had been diagnosed with cervical cancer. Unable to remember the precise medical terms, much less how to pronounce them, she wailed that six weeks earlier she had tested positive to a gynecological examination routinely performed every two or three years to all females between ages twenty-five and sixty-five. She had been taken to a hospital and the doctors had looked into her with a periscope.
“Periscope, Sobeida?” struggling to keep a straight face.
“Or some name ending in scope … Then they took a sample for a biozia and said I had carcinonga.”
Sobeida admitted to living in terror since then. She was scheduled to undergo surgery to remove her cervix and uterus in two weeks. She had no appetite, slept merely two or three hours at nights, could no longer go shopping for her clients. Steil comforted her. Most patients that were diagnosed early on lived many more years, he said, then invented the story that sufferers whose affected organs had been surgically removed registered a higher rate of survival than patients treated with chemotherapy. Cuban doctors were good. She would get well. Then he told her about himself.
She had not had lunch yet and he was hungry. Sensing that a change of air would do her well, he asked her to put a dress on then drove to El Aljibe. The Seventh Avenue restaurant is famous in Miami for its excellent roasted chicken and outrageous prices. Both things were true, Steil confirmed. During the meal, the host increased his guest’s inventory of jokes with a few doing the rounds in Miami. After dessert, over a nice cup of espresso, feeling elated for the first time since her malignancy had been diagnosed, Sobeida became her real self.
“The Chief stages a rally at Revolution Plaza. A million people gather. After the national anthem, he addresses the crowd: ‘I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that Cuban scientists, the best scientists in the entire world, have achieved a gigantic breakthrough that will astound the world and deliver one more punch to the criminal blockade imposed on our heroic people by the United States. Starting tomorrow, we will be able to feed ourselves with stones.’ The crowd grumbles in disgust. ‘That’s the good news? What’s the bad news?’ a guy hollers. ‘The bad news is,’ the Chief explains, ‘we haven’t got enough treated stones, so we will begin by giving each and every citizen one ounce of stone per week.’”
Back in her apartment, Steil gave Sobeida five hundred dollars, repeated his assurance that she would make a speedy and full recovery after the operation, then began saying his farewells. The old woman started sobbing silently; Steil felt dismayed. He gave her a peck on the cheek, turned, went outside, and closed the door behind him.
On Tuesday morning, Elliot paid a visit to the Colón Cemetery before driving to Santa Cruz del Norte. There were flowers for sale and he bought a dozen roses. His mother’s remains had already been moved to a charnel house and now lay in an ossuary. Standing in front of the crypt, he surprised himself by turning over in his mind the same pseudophilosophical misconceptions everybody thinks in graveyards and felt ashamed for it. What was he doing here? Carmen was not a pile of bones. She was what he remembered of her, what her three living siblings and numerous nephews remembered of her, the few faded black-and-white photographs kept in Santa Cruz del Norte. So, what was he honoring here? Bones? Steil turned, left the charnel house, and dropped the roses in a trash can. Cremation would have been the right thing to do.
After driving through the tunnel under Havana Bay, the memories of his mother gradually receded. Following Avenida Monumental and the Vía Blanca, Elliot moved into rural Cuba. By the time he left the town of Guanabo, he was so seduced by the greenness of the countryside to the right that he veered off the freeway, followed a dirt road for a hundred yards or so, pulled over, and got out. With both hands in his pockets, he strolled along the shoulder of the road, taking in his surroundings. A wooden house painted orange with a roof of red tiles could be seen half a mile away, birds chirped atop overhanging branches swaying in the breeze, cows grazed behind a barbed-wire fence, butterflies fluttered about. To the north, east, and west the sky was perfect blue; to the south, a snow-white cloudbank broke the monotony. Being April, he knew that around three or four o’clock dark clouds would be massing over the center and south of Havana Province; rain would come down in torrents to the south of San José de las Lajas and Aguacate; to the north of that imaginary line it was just a possibility. Everyone is a meteorologist where they were born and raised, he chuckled.
His spirit rose and he took a deep breath. The countryside smelled of earth, dew, pollen, cattle dung, grass, seabreeze, and aromatic plants. The distant crow of a rooster reached him. Was he a country boy at heart? He found such ambivalence rather surprising. When he had completed his military stint he thought he hated Santa Cruz del Norte, wanted desperately to settle in Havana, and was overjoyed when they moved there. Now, having resided for many years in the Cuban capital, plus eight more in Miami, he longed for his birthplace. A trip to his roots, maybe to the seed itself. Old age knocking.
A jeep was closing in on him fast, leaving behind a cloud of red dust. The Gaz scraped to a halt by the surprised tourist and an army lieutenant in battle dress deftly jumped to the ground. A corporal remained at the wheel. Both wore webbed belts and sidearms. In a flash Elliot realized what was about to happen. A rental meant a foreigner. The army counterintelligence officer from a nearby military outfit had been notified that a probable CIA spy was scouting the battlefield.
“Good morning,” the officer said as he saluted.
“Good morning.”
“Oh, you speak Spanish.”
“I’m Cuban.”
The lieutenant squinted. Reading him like an open book, Elliot waited for the inescapable question.
“You live in Cuba?”
“No, I live in Miami.”
“Can I see your passport?”
The man first inspected Steil’s passport, then the copy of the rental car lease.
“Well, sir,” returning the documents, “this is a military road, civilians are not authorized to drive through. I ask you to please return to the freeway.”
“No problem. I just wonder why you don’t put up a sign. You wouldn’t have to drive over every time someone feels like stretching their legs,” Elliot said tongue-in-cheek.
The lieutenant appeared to consider it, but said nothing. Steil was pulling the driver’s door open when he heard the officer’s last question.
“Is your name Cuban?”
“No, it’s American.”
Twenty or thirty seconds later, in the rearview mirror, Elliot saw the man duly logging something, maybe the rental’s plates and his name. Clicking his tongue, forcing a smile, and shaking his head sadly, he gained the freeway and sped to Santa Cruz del Norte.
…
Compartmentalization is enforced in intelligence and counterintelligence agencies to ensure ironclad secrecy. Exceptions are kept to a bare minimum. For instance, no psychologist worth his salt will perform the remote profiling of a possible top-level agent based on distorted data. The recruit’s real age, sex, race, nationality, education, profession, place of residence, and personal history must be evaluated if a well-founded opinion is to be given. The candidate may be assigned a cryptonym, but the information has to be genuine.
This textbook case of centralism became known in Cuba as The First Sacred Rule. Consequently, as soon as compartmentalization was transgressed, like when a large meeting was convened, everyone assumed the agenda had nothing to do with their bread and butter and dismissed it as so much crap they were forced to put up with and paid little heed to.
Which was the attitude that Tuesday morning inside the General Directorate of Intelligence’s small and dimly lit theater, where thirty-seven poker-faced officers in mufti were attending the postmortem of the failed coup in Venezuela.
An hour-by-hour report covering the four days had bee
n hastily assembled from the coded bulletins filed by colleagues under diplomatic cover in the Cuban embassy in Caracas, by three illegals in the cities of Barquisimeto, Maracaibo, and Barinas, and by numerous news wires. Edited portions of CNN, CBS, NBC, and Fox footage, taped at the Institute for Radio and Television, were being shown on two big-screen TV sets. The captain operating the VCR had a copy of the report. He inserted and ejected cassettes in coordination with the day, hour, and specific event that the narrator, Lieutenant Colonel Mario, was referring to.
Victoria watched as Chaviano was taken away from the Presidential Palace in the middle of the night. Days earlier, facing cameras and microphones, the man had boasted he would never surrender. However, he had meekly relinquished power the instant a general placed him under arrest. “For the good of the country.” “To avoid bloodshed.” Cambronne, a division general under Napoleon, came to mind. He had allegedly responded “Shit!” when, during a pregnant pause at the Battle of Waterloo, an English general bade him to surrender. A sanitized version has him crying, “The Guard die but not ever surrender.” Many of his soldiers died all right, but not him. Years later he married an English aristocrat and served one of Napoleon’s worst enemies: King Louis XVIII. Men are so conceited and words are so cheap, Victoria mused, that women should be wary of both. She respected Salvador Allende, the late Chilean president, because he had been that most uncharacteristic of animals: a down-to-earth, unpretentious, levelheaded, well-balanced politician who secured his place in history by choosing honorable death before undignified surrender.
Victoria judged the silence of the audience deceptive. She felt sure that most of those men and women, if not all, considered Chaviano a fucking coward. But well aware that he was a favorite of the Chief, not one would dare say it aloud, thus evidencing that they were not models of bravery either. Cuban adults from all walks of life, especially the older and better educated, knew the Commander believed that anyone who thought different was mentally deficient, morally corrupt, or a traitor.
