by Jose Latour
“Absolutely. Let’s move to the PC. I want to show you some graphs first.”
For a little over an hour, Elliot filled Maria in on both Brazilian offices: São Paulo and Recife. Not having personally met the staff, his summary lacked substance on the human side. It was just products, sales, clients, margins, the rate of exchange of the real, and even some wild speculation on how Lala’s candidacy to the presidency could affect the country’s future. At a quarter past six he was through.
“Well, I’m amazed,” Maria said. “Do you follow our other subsidiaries with the same thoroughness?”
“No. Brazil and Argentina demand more attention. Brazil due to the volume of business there; Argentina because of the economic crisis.”
“I see. Nice presentation, Elliot. Thanks. Now I wonder whether it would be possible for you to do me another favor.”
“Sure. What is it?”
“To call Havana tonight and say uncle is recovering and he’ll stay at the Wyndham Casa Marina between May 3 and May 8.”
Not believing his ears, Elliot anyhow realized that Brazil had been just an excuse in case other people were around when she got there. Maria had realized that were she to arrive, talk to him for a couple of minutes, and leave, others might have wondered what was going on. He stared at her for so long that she raised her eyebrows and widened her eyes in admiration, an unspoken What’s the matter?
“Let me make sure I’ve got this straight,” the bewildered Elliot said. “You found the cash and are giving it back?”
Maria turned her head away and let her gaze rove around the warehouse, a gesture meant to express mild irritation.
“Elliot, you very clearly explained to me the reasons why you want to ‘bow out’ at this stage. They are valid reasons. I understand. Maybe it’s just that I wouldn’t like to have on my conscience that three people went to jail because they lost a hundred Gs. So, please, don’t ask any questions. Just make the call, all right?”
Again, Elliot stared at her. What would Hart and McLellan think? They thought it was a mistake that he had told Maria Scheindlin that he wanted out. Steil had given her the perfect excuse to cut him off, they had argued. He did not tell the agents that that was exactly what he wanted. But suddenly he regretted being excluded. Would he make up his mind? Did he want in or out? Out? Okay, he was out. So, why was he disgruntled? No backtracking was possible, though.
“Fine. Let me jot down the name of the hotel in Key West,” pulling out the ballpoint.
“Wyndham Casa Marina.”
Elliot tore a page from his desk calendar and wrote on it. “And the dates?”
“Between May 3 and May 8.”
Elliot finished taking the note and lifted his head. “Anything else, Maria?”
“No, Elliot, and thanks for your help. I really appreciate it,” getting to her feet.
“My pleasure, Maria,” standing up, too.
“Where’s Sam?”
“He said he’d spend the afternoon at customs and then go straight home.”
“Okay. Give him my regards.”
“I will.”
“Take care, Elliot.”
“You too, Maria.”
…
That evening, from the safe house and after enduring a few “We told you so’s” delivered by the exasperated Hart and McLellan, Elliot dialed 5378324969. He assumed that the strange-looking machine attached to the line, with numerous dials and blinking lights, was a tape recorder. No tapes or cassettes were visible, though. There were three rings before someone lifted the handset in Cuba.
“Hello.”
“Hi there, buddy, how’re you doing?”
“Hey, mi hermano, great to hear from you. I’m fine, thanks. What’s the latest about Uncle Gustavo? We’re worried.”
“He’s fine, was released from the hospital yesterday and, you know what? He’s feeling so well he plans to spend from May 3 to 8 at a Key West hotel: the Wyndham Casa Marina. Sunning himself by the pool and watching the half-naked babes, he says.”
“Coñó, that’s great!” Lights blinked madly in the machine. “I’m overjoyed.”
I bet you are, Elliot thought. He said instead: “We are very happy, too. Please call the rest of the family and let them know.”
“I will, sure. Tell uncle the whole family is dying to see him. When he comes we’ll roast a pig for him. And tell me, how are you doing?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“Okay. Let’s hang up then. I don’t want this call to cost you too much. Thanks for the good news.”
“The family is the family. Bye, now.”
“Bye, and thanks again.”
Six
At quarter past 1:00 P.M. on Saturday, April 27, Manuel Pardo left the Institute of Meteorology, an old building located on top of a hill in the town of Casablanca, on the eastern shore of Havana Bay, and performed his daily routine of covering the 1.5 kilometers to Avenida Monumental on foot. Once he got to the eight-lane freeway, however, rather than crossing it to board a westbound bus to Vedado, which he always did, Pardo remained on the side of eastbound traffic. He ambled nonchalantly to a bus stop and sat on a granite bench.
At half past 1:00 P.M., Victoria Valiente keyed in the number to set the alarm and closed the door to her cubicle on the eighth floor of the General Directorate of Intelligence. On her way to the elevator, she produced an inhaler from her shoulder bag. Once inside the metal cage, Victoria punched the basement button, shook and pumped the inhaler twice, recapped it, and dropped it into the bag. When the door slid open twenty seconds later, she marched to her parking space.
Moments later her Tico ascended the ramp to A Street, rolled around the corner at Línea, and at the next corner turned right onto Paseo Avenue. After Calzada, Victoria shot a glance at her apartment building across the median divider and tried to breathe deeply. At the foot of Paseo, she took a right onto Malecón. The day was clear and a little humid; the sea a bit choppy, as always after midday when the eastern breeze gained in strength. Victoria shot a glance at the U.S. Interests Section as she drove by, then concentrated on her driving.
Intelligence and Counterintelligence officers were on 24/7 call, but since the mid-seventies—when the number of divorced people soared dramatically in Interior—a conscious effort had been made to allow them to spend Saturday afternoons and Sundays with their families. Complete on-duty schedules were drawn up six months in advance in order to make family plans for the weekends possible. Deskbound guys seldom saw their quality time disrupted.
In contrast, most public holidays were exhausting for members of the Ministry of the Interior. Beginning at midnight two or three days earlier, all officers, enlisted men, policemen, and cadets, including maintenance staff and excluding prison guards and firefighters, were given special chores. They had to stake out the homes of dissenters and ex–prisoners of conscience, or stand watch on the rooftops of tall buildings, direct traffic, shut off streets, intensify the surveillance of diplomats and tourists, inspect manholes and mailboxes, and so forth. This was the weekend before Labor Day, May 1, in Cuba. The high-ranking officers that had not been invited to the reviewing stand from which the Chief would wave to those taking part in the march would gather at the ministry to watch the parade from the rooftop. Victoria already had her invitation for the reviewing stand.
At 1:46, she drove through the tunnel under Havana Bay and within two minutes pulled over a few meters before reaching the bus stop where her husband waited. Upon seeing the Tico, Pardo got to his feet and hurried to the car. He yanked open the passenger door, plopped in the seat, closed the door. Victoria stared at him for a few moments and smiled. He returned her smile. She poked him in the ribs; he stuck his tongue out at her. Nothing was said. When she pulled away, Pardo turned the radio on and tuned in to a four-hour-long pop music program.
For the next sixty-five minutes the car sped east to Matanzas, capital of the Cuban province of the same name. Every minute or so Victoria shot a glance at her rea
rview mirror. Once the traffic got lighter past Guanabo, Pardo fished into his wife’s shoulder bag, extracted a powder compact, and used its mirror to scan the road behind every five or six minutes. A traffic sign announcing Santa Cruz del Norte made Victoria remember Elliot Steil. She glanced briefly at her husband, who nodded and smiled. Seven minutes before reaching their destination, Pardo returned the powder compact to the shoulder bag and for a while delighted in the spectacular view of the Yumurí Valley.
Victoria parked in front of Teatro Sauto, the hub of Matanzas’s cultural life. The couple got out and Pardo removed a bulging duffel bag from the trunk before Victoria locked the car. They covered four blocks on foot to a dollars-only taxi stand, boarded a Peugeot, and asked the cabbie to take them to the Meliá Habana Hotel, in Miramar, La Habana. This made the driver a happy man. He could get a two-or three-dollar tip and return to his hometown later in the day with tourists or upper-class Cubans on their way to Varadero. A perfect day. Half an hour after entering Matanzas, Pardo and Victoria began retracing their course to Havana.
At 4:25 P.M. they ambled into the Meliá Habana, used the restrooms, reunited in the lobby, had a hot dog and a soda at the cafeteria, then returned to the hotel entrance and asked the doorman for a taxi. This time a more spacious Hyundai slowly ascended onto the driveway.
“Take us to Güira de Melena,” Pardo ordered the cabbie once the hotel employee was out of earshot.
The road to Güira de Melena was dotted with royal palms, fruit trees, vegetable gardens, potato fields, sugarcane and banana plantations, and fields of numerous cash crops. A few cows and horses grazed. Fifty- and sixty-year-old American farm tractors—contaminating monuments to the Cubans’ mechanical ingenuity—plowed a rich, dark red soil. All sorts of houses, ranging from magnificent residences built by rich people decades before the Revolution to modest wooden huts roofed with palm fronds, flanked the blacktop. Pardo knew that many plots were privately owned, and as such, were productive and cost-effective. Wherever private businesses had been authorized to operate, they had proven across-the-board superiority over state-owned competitors for many years now. But as the saying goes, nobody is blindest than he who refuses to see, he thought, and clicked his tongue. Victoria looked at him inquisitively. He smiled and dismissed her concern by shaking his head.
In Güira de Melena the couple shopped around for some time before approaching a man behind the wheel of a ’53 Buick Roadmaster parked in a street that flanked the town’s central park. Would he be willing to take them to Mariel, a port on the northern coast of the province? The guy said he would, for fifteen dollars; Pardo haggled him down to twelve just to act according to custom. The jalopy’s windshield lacked the sticker authorizing it to operate as a private taxi, so the hacker would vehemently deny ever having driven anyone anywhere, should he be asked. The piece of junk was his, he was trying to make an honest buck, but to the government he had a hustle going.
It was 6:15 P.M. when they departed Güira de Melena. In reply to Pardo’s gentle inquiring, the cabbie explained that the diesel engine of a Romanian tractor had replaced the car’s original 325-horsepower, V-8 engine. What he didn’t say was that the diesel engine had been stolen from a state farm. Victoria considered this a sample of the real Cuba that she and people like her had no clue existed. They retraced to San Antonio first, then turned left to Guanajay. At long last, they got out of the car on the outskirts of Mariel around 7:30. The cabbie U-turned and waved a good-bye. They waved back.
Having never been there before, Victoria looked around. Two chimneys were spewing whitish smoke against the setting sun. “Cement factory” clarified Pardo, who was eyeing her. She assented. As in most Cuban towns, tall buildings were almost nonexistent. Two or three kilometers away, along the shoreline, new-looking construction caught her eye. “Free trade zone,” Pardo explained. She nodded again. The white flashes of a lighthouse marked the west side of the harbor entrance.
From here, Victoria remembered, 120,000 Cubans had emigrated to the United States in 1980. The Chief had seized the opportunity to empty his penitentiaries and pack off a few thousand criminals and a handful of spies to Mr. Carter. The violence unleashed by the “Marielitos,” as the criminals came to be known in the United States, was one of the situations that helped Reagan defeat the incumbent president in that year’s election. Close to twenty-two years had gone by when the thirty-ninth U.S. president had announced he would visit Cuba in May, hoping to improve relations between both countries. Did he really think he could? Victoria believed that candid, principled souls ought to abstain from seriously engaging in politics. Carter seemed principled to her, he may just pretend to be candid, she speculated.
“Let’s go,” Pardo said.
They started walking, holding hands. Most close-by homes were of bricks and blocks with concrete roofs. Simple in design, they had the botched-up look that many modest private houses constructed by self-help groups share. As it was perfectly natural to expect, the cement utilized to build them had been stolen from the nearby factory. It was dark already and Pardo guided his wife through a maze of streets lacking sidewalks in which potholes abounded. Public illumination was nonexistent, and night had fallen by the time Pardo knocked on a wooden front door.
“Who is it?” a gruff voice asked.
“It’s me, Pardo.”
A potbellied, suntanned man with dark brown hair and an impressive mustache on an otherwise clean-shaven face opened the door. Victoria judged him to be between thirty-five and forty, five-feet-ten, around 180 pounds. He wore a Cuban navy uniform, the rank of ensign on its epaulets.
“Welcome,” he said, a smile playing on his lips. “Come on in.”
They crossed the threshold and the navy officer closed the door. “Meet my wife,” Pardo said to the host.
“Diego, pleased to meet you,” the man said, extending his hand.
“On an occasion such as this, I’m not just being formal when I say the pleasure is all mine,” Victoria, taking it.
She thought his smile virile and attractive. Victoria quickly scanned the place. According to Pardo, Ensign Diego Amieba had divorced two years earlier, and she assumed that the framed photograph of a two- or three-year-old boy atop the old Russian TV set was the only remains of the failed marriage. The living area looked as unkempt and dusty as any other Cuban bachelor’s home. Most of the furniture was old: a precious-wood sofa with wickerwork back and seats, two matching armchairs, two rocking chairs, a coffee table, a modern nest of tables with a radio and knickknacks, an oscillating fan. Upon a wall, a cheap decorative rug showed an adult lion lying down on the floor of a living room, a smiling boy reclining on the beast. On the opposite wall hung two framed color prints of the Chief and his brother in full dress uniforms.
“You know how it is,” Amieba said, having watched Victoria inspect the place.
“Yeah, I know. I have the same prints at home,” she lied.
“You do?” with a big smile. “But sit down, please, sit down. Give me a minute.”
Pardo nodded and the ensign disappeared inside a short hall. Victoria chose an armchair, her husband a corner of the sofa. They exchanged an affectionate glance and kept their agreement to remain silent indoors. She checked in her mind what Pardo had told her about the navy officer.
Always on the lookout for safe escape routes, her husband had met Amieba three years earlier while providing regular maintenance to meteorological equipment in Mariel. He had carefully nurtured the relationship because the ensign was the skipper of a cigarette speedboat impounded by the Cuban government from drug smugglers and converted into a patrol boat. If nothing else, Pardo hoped to learn the procedures, habits, and mentality of coastguardsmen. A fourteen-year veteran of the Cuban navy and a party member since 1993, the ensign had been based in Mariel for ten years now, having previously served aboard a Soviet Pauk II fast patrol craft which was decommissioned in 1997 for lack of spare parts.
The navy had always been the Cinderella of the Revol
utionary Armed Forces, lacking a fairy godmother and prince. From the very beginning, the Commander had realized what only a half-wit would have failed to perceive: Should an American administration invade Cuba, he couldn’t confront the U.S. Navy or Air Force. The October 1962 missile crisis and the Soviet Union’s hasty pullout confirmed this. Therefore, both Cuban services were designed essentially as reconnaissance forces. Should there be a war, it would be waged on land.
Intervention in Africa somewhat modified such a strategic concept for the air force. The navy’s expansion, however, had been limited to manning three outdated, diesel-powered Soviet subs that escorted Cuban transport ships across the South Atlantic. After 1994, the decay of the Cuban navy precipitated. Lacking spare parts, frigates were stripped down, patrol boats moored, their SS-N-2 Styx missile batteries mounted on rolling platforms and placed near beaches to repel improbable amphibious assaults. The Cuban submarine base was converted into a tourist facility in 1998. Demoralization infected officers and enlisted men alike. In 1999, ensign Amieba was appointed skipper of the thirty-five-foot cigarette with twin two-hundred-horsepower outboard engines.
Every time he spent a couple of days in Mariel, Pardo tried to devote at least one evening to playing dominoes with Amieba and a couple of his subordinates, or have a beer or two with the ensign, or simply chat amiably about any conceivable subject, from baseball (both were rabid Pinar del Río fans) to what they did for a living—Pardo pretending to be as aroused by fishing and sailing as Amieba was genuinely interested in computers. In the jokes he told, or in those that made him roar with laughter, and in other seemingly light comments, Amieba reflected dissatisfaction with his present condition and bleak prospects.
Still, one night in December 2001—when their friendship was over two and a half years old, two shots of rum had exacerbated the ensign’s frustration, and nobody was around—Amieba admitted to having failed as a naval officer, a husband, and a father. His job consisted of intercepting compatriots fleeing from misery and in picking up “bombarded” bales of cocaine, he had sadly acknowledged. The woman he loved had pulled up stakes and moved in with a farmer seventeen years her senior who made more money in a week than he did in three months, Amieba had further revealed. The guy bought his kid the clothes and toys he could not afford. Persuaded that the ensign craved a fresh start, Pardo decided to test the waters.
