The Cat King of Havana

by Tom Crosshill

  Another minute, and he’d left to see Pablo.

  In an hour he was back.

  “Give him until Monday.” We sat in the living room, holding council. “I’ll get him back on his feet. You’ll see.”

  “We don’t want to waste time on an alcoholic,” Ana said.

  “Pay him once a week, and you’ll be fine,” Yosvany said.

  “Why do people treat drunks like children?” Ana asked.

  “Because it works,” Yosvany answered.

  But I wondered. Maybe we simply didn’t want to think of them as adults. Didn’t want to consider what it must have taken, to reduce an adult to a sobbing mess on his knees in front of two teenagers.

  chapter twelve

  RICARDO EUGENIO ECHEVERRÍA LÓPEZ

  Since we had the next morning free, Yosvany invited us to visit his uncle Elio’s restaurant. “We’ve got a tres guitarist from Camagüey visiting today,” he told us over breakfast.

  It was a wet morning, alternating between periods of intense sunshine and downpours. During the latter, the streets ran with water and, in places, trash. We piled into a colectivo and trekked out to Vedado, where the paladar Tres Gaviotas sat in the shadow of Cuba’s tallest skyscraper, the FOCSA building.

  The paladar occupied the patio of a tan two-story building, an airy space with simple wooden tables and a concrete floor, protected from the rain by a faded plastic awning. Only one of the tables was occupied when we arrived, by a young German couple picking at a salad of chicken and wilted cabbage leaves. Near one wall the musicians were setting up, five men with graying hair. Seeing us enter, the double bass player walked over. He was a stocky, muscle-bound type in a button-down shirt.

  “Hi, tío,” Yosvany said. “This is my cousin Rick and his friend Ana.”

  “Welcome.” Yosvany’s uncle Elio shook my hand, cheek-kissed Ana, turned to Yosvany. “We start in five. The Germans want ‘Guantanamera.’”

  “‘Guantanamera,’ voy pa’allá,” Yosvany said.

  “I’ll get you some refrescos,” Elio said before departing with Yosvany.

  The band’s take on “Guantanamera” was low-key and light. Yosvany’s uncle sang lead even as he picked at his double bass. The tres player from Camagüey did a few intricate, playful solos. They moved on to “Cuarto de Tula” and “Chan Chan,” playing gamely, with big smiles and apparent zest. Yosvany played the congas, tapping out rapid rhythms with distracted, nonchalant ease.

  At the end of their set, Ana walked over to Yosvany. “Nice playing,” she said. “Can you do something other than this tourist stuff?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, Silvio Rodríguez? ‘Mariposas’ or ‘Ojalá’ or something?”

  Yosvany looked at the others. The tres player nodded, but Yosvany’s uncle shrugged. “I don’t know the lyrics.”

  “I got this,” Yosvany said.

  Of course he did.

  The tres guitar started into a contemplative, melancholy melody.

  Yosvany had a low voice, rough at the edges but pleasant. He sang of love, of children killed by bombs and napalm, of a decent girl who must mind what people might say at church.

  Ana gave a little sigh. “And he can sing too.”

  I can edit a mean cat video, I thought. I’ve made Reddit’s front page on fifteen different occasions.

  But when Yosvany came by the table later, I told him, “Nice singing.” Because it had been. And because there’s a difference between thinking douchey thoughts and being a douche.

  I looked at my watch. “We’re meeting Rafaela in forty minutes. Might be best to get going.”

  “Oh, I can’t go,” Ana said. “Sorry. Yosvany’s taking me to a salsa party in Playa. No tourists, just locals. He says I can get some great footage for my film.”

  It was funny, I reflected in the almendrón to Habana Vieja. I’d come to Havana dreaming that I’d master dance and become this cool guy and sweep Ana off her feet. But if anything, leaving New York had robbed me of camouflage. I now felt like the number one nerd of an entire country.

  Filled with a restless energy, I walked fast through Habana Vieja to the Museo del Chocolate.

  Rafaela Pilar González met me on Mercaderes Street outside the café. It was one of the posh restored streets in the middle of the old city, all bright colors and picturesque colonial architecture. Rafaela stood pressed against the wall to avoid the steady stream of tourists. She wore a fine blue dress and high-heeled shoes and had her hair up in a fancy do.

  I regretted my jeans and T-shirt instantly. I hadn’t thought this might be a special occasion for her.

  Rafaela’s face lit up when she saw me. “I was up all night thinking about you,” she said. “There’s so much you should know, cariño.”

  The Museo del Chocolate was a combination café and chocolate shop. Tourists waited in line to browse a veritable chocolate zoo of bear and turtle and rabbit figurines. There was no wait in the café, though.

  A waitress slapped down two laminated menus before departing wordlessly. That kind of attitude would have rated scathing Yelp comments in New York. It seemed to be the norm at state-owned businesses in Havana. Not much incentive for good customer service if you’re guaranteed a job for life, I supposed.

  “This is such a wonderful place,” Rafaela said. “The hot chocolate is amazing.”

  “Let’s get some.” Recalling this was probably a rare outing for her, I added, “And please, order some food. Anything you like.”

  “I don’t enjoy food much anymore,” Rafaela said. “Nothing tastes the way it used to. But this hot chocolate . . . it takes me back. To when I was a girl in Holguín, and Fidel was just another boy’s name.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There was a café called El Principe in Holguín. A friend of my mother’s was a waiter there, Alberto, a big hairy man. He made me hot chocolate. I sat in the window sipping it while my mother and Alberto went outside to kiss.” Rafaela chuckled. “They thought I didn’t know. Qué va. I didn’t mind, though. I watched the lights in the window, these bright neon lights. At home we didn’t even have electricity.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “My village didn’t get electricity until Fidel came down from the mountains. I was in Havana by then, married, but I remember the letters I got from my little sister. How excited she was to have that glowing bulb in her bedroom. A few months later they opened a school in the village. She got to learn math and literature and other things. That’s why I never complained when my Eduardo joined the army. Fidel and the barbudos, they were bringing Cuba into the future.”

  “And today?” I asked, thinking of Miranda Galvez, Yolanda’s friend. “Are they still bringing Cuba into the future?”

  Rafaela blinked as if awakened, chewed her lip for a moment. “Mira, of course we have problems. Any country has problems. In the US, innocent people get shot in the street by the police, and poor folks die because they can’t afford to go to the doctor.” She shrugged, a small, conciliatory gesture. “But we’re not here to talk politics. Let me tell you about your mother.”

  The waitress came to take our orders. Once she was gone, I asked, “What was she like back then?”

  “I met her the day we moved in,” Rafaela said. “A tall, thin fifteen-year-old, all bones. She wore this pretty white summer dress two sizes too big. I remember thinking, I hope she grows into that thing. She ran into us on the stairs—Eduardo and I were lugging up our furniture. She offered to help, though it was obvious she really wanted to run off. Eduardo said claro, of course she could help, so she worked with us for hours. The next day I took her for ice cream at Coppelia. She told me all about her school and her novios, and the stories she was writing.”

  “Boyfriends?” I asked. “Wait, she was writing stories?” Mom had taught literature, but she’d never mentioned writing any.

  “Oh, yes,” Rafaela said. “Exciting pieces with titles like ‘In the Sierra Maestra’ and ‘Daughter of the Revolution.’ Kids
fighting against imperialist soldiers, setting booby traps, throwing themselves on grenades to avoid capture.”

  This sounded about as likely as Rush Limbaugh praising Obamacare.

  “You have to remember, your grandfather was a colonel in the army,” Rafaela said. “And María adored him. All the way until 1980 she adored him.”

  My heart beat faster. That was the year of the Mariel boatlift, when Mom had come to the States. “What happened then?”

  Our hot chocolate arrived. It was strong, dark stuff, less sweet than I was used to. Rafaela smacked her lips in pleasure. For a moment I saw the girl she must have once been.

  “Some people thought it was politics,” Rafaela said. “Others called it teenage rebellion. But what really happened to your mother was a boy. It was a surprise to us all. María always had boys circling her but she cared more for her stories than for the Josés and Oscars and Paulitos of the day.”

  “Until?”

  “Until Ricardo Eugenio Echeverría López.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Not much to look at,” Rafaela said. “A bit plump, always red in the face. But he was a poet. Not one of the pájaros who write about birds and flowers. He was a poet in the style of José Martí and Salomé Ureña, all love of the fatherland and hot blood spilt on cool sand.”

  I blinked. This smiling old lady just used a homophobic slur without so much as a pause.

  “Is something wrong, dear?”

  “Uhh . . . so my mom fell for a revolutionary poet?”

  “Yes. But his revolution wasn’t Fidel’s.”

  “Oh.”

  “His dad was in prison. His uncle’s raft disappeared somewhere between Havana and Miami. He was a marked gusano already. So he walked about the place shooting off his mouth like he didn’t care. María met him at the Malecón one night. They spent the next six months at each other’s throats. She’d come to me sometimes, furious about this or that thing he’d said about Fidel or the army or the Revolution. Except as the months passed she came to me less and less. Until one day I saw them at the beach, kissing in the surf.” Rafaela smiled. “I should have expected it. María had led a sheltered life. She wasn’t ready to see the Cuba Ricardo showed her. And, well, she was a girl and he was a boy. Whenever a boy and a girl feel that strongly about each other, what does it matter if it’s love or hate?”

  I thought that perhaps Mom had understood more of Cuba than Rafaela credited her for. I could see it—Mom at my age, coming to grips with the realization that her father worked for an oppressive government.

  “What did my grandfather do?” I asked.

  “María wasn’t a fool,” Rafaela said. “She kept her change of heart to herself. She and Ricardo, they had one happy year together. He gave inspiration to her stories. She reined in his excesses, tamped down his outbursts, kept him safe. Then came the spring of 1980.”

  “Mariel,” I said.

  Rafaela nodded. “I remember it like today. April first, when those crazies crashed a bus into the Peruvian embassy and got asylum. Fidel announced he wouldn’t stop anyone who wanted to join them. Within days, thousands of people were crowding into the embassy garden. Ricardo must have convinced María to go. She didn’t tell me, but I figure that’s how it was. They agreed to meet at a park in Miramar late one night and walk to the embassy together.”

  “They never made it,” I guessed.

  “When your mother got to the park, Ricardo wasn’t there,” Rafaela said. “She waited for an hour. He didn’t come. But your grandfather did. He told her Ricardo had betrayed her. He said the boy had joined the army, had left Havana already.”

  I went cold. “And she believed him?”

  “Of course not,” Rafaela said. “She thought her father had beat Ricardo up, had forced the truth from him. But Leo had a letter for her, in Ricardo’s handwriting. And, well . . . he’d been given a choice. Go to prison for his poems or join the army.”

  Even at the remove of decades, I felt this as a punch to the stomach.

  “María went home with Leo that night,” Rafaela said. “She didn’t try to run away. She didn’t care about leaving anymore. We all believed that. Even when I went to talk to her the next day, she just sat at her desk and stared out the window. For Ricardo she had only one word. Traidor.”

  “Because he gave her up?”

  Rafaela shrugged. “Because he joined the army and gave up his poems, I suppose. What do I really know? What did any of us know? We all thought María had lost her will to run away.”

  “But she did run,” I said.

  “Yes,” Rafaela said. “Some days later she told Leo she wanted to go for a walk. He let her. He thought she’d seen reason, and anyway the embassy had been closed off at that point. But that was the day Fidel opened Mariel Harbor, told all Cuba to get out if they wanted to. We never found out how she got aboard, but María left on one of the first ships to Miami.” Rafaela paused. “She never called. Never wrote. Never sent word of any kind. Not for years. It was hard on Juanita. It broke Leo. He retired soon after.”

  I clutched my cup of cold chocolate and marveled. Mom hadn’t just up and left Cuba. She’d escaped under the nose of her despot father. There’d been a love story, and a betrayal . . . she’d lived a life fit for a telenovela.

  She’d been eighteen. Only two years older than me.

  All the years of my life she’d refused to speak of her past. Only now it struck me what it must have really meant, that denial of her homeland. How deep her resentment must have gone.

  “There must be more to the story,” I said. “Why did Ricardo give up on her that easily? Why did she give up on him?”

  “There’s always more to the story,” Rafaela said. “But I don’t know the rest. Leo died. Ricardo disappeared from our lives—I never heard of him after that day. I never asked. I detested him for María’s sake, the way I figured she detested him.” Rafaela gave me a slow, measuring look. “But now I wonder.”

  “What? Why?”

  “A boy called Ricardo comes from New York and says he’s the son of María Gutiérrez Peña.” Rafaela gave a little shrug.

  I stared at her.

  Ricardo.

  As in, Ricardo Eugenio Echeverría.

  No, that made no sense. My name was Richard—that’s what my passport said. Richard, not Ricardo.

  I tried desperately to remember who’d picked my name. Hadn’t Dad told me some story about it? Maybe they’d used a baby name book. Maybe my grandmother in Leipzig had suggested it. . . .

  “But . . . why?” I asked.

  Surely Mom wouldn’t name me after someone who’d betrayed her. Someone she detested.

  Rafaela reached across the table, patted my hand with knobby fingers. “That’s a question you stop asking, here in Cuba. One day someone’s here and tomorrow she’s gone, se fue, and there’s no one left to answer.”

  chapter thirteen

  MR. MODERNITY

  That night Ana got home from Yosvany’s fiesta charged up. “It was amazing,” she said. “Some of these dancers . . . this old guy bounced around to salsa like he was boxing. A couple of kids, ten years old, did better casino than anyone in New York. And there was this rumbero, man, the way he could move. It was all locals, a totally different vibe, people having fun. I got some crazy footage.”

  “Sounds awesome,” I said. And I managed to mean it.

  Rafaela’s stories had made me think. To consider the revolutionary poet Ricardo, and my mother the fiction writer, and their life on the verge of exile. They’d been two kids who believed in something. Who’d supported each other’s passions.

  The next morning, Pablo met us in the street outside his building in clean, pressed jeans and shirt—sober, businesslike. “I apologize for last week,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”

  “Yosvany is a good friend to you,” Ana said, her voice cool.

  “Yes, and a good businessman,” Pablo said.

  Which made me wonder if Yosvany was get
ting a kickback from the classes. I decided I didn’t care, not as long as Pablo stayed sober.

  And he did. Week after week, he drove us hard.

  Our lives settled back into a regular beat. Havana started to feel like home. I no longer noticed the crumbling architecture or the potholes. My early cravings for burritos and pizza and a quality burger had faded with the weeks. I checked up on my website occasionally at the Hotel Parque Central, made sure my team of mods was keeping CatoTrope on track, but I forgot to miss broadband. My Spanish loosened up, words slurring together, vowels disappearing a lo cubano. On more than one occasion Cubans in the street took me for a local, asked me for directions with some half-swallowed cubanismo or other.

  Before we knew it, we were halfway through our trip.

  One night early in August we went to see Los Van Van in concert.

  If you’re a salsero that sentence has you frothing at the mouth. For the rest of you—Los Van Van is the most famous Cuban salsa band in the world. They’ve been playing since the late sixties and they still rock it. Check out songs like “Agua” or “Tim Pop” or “Me Mantengo” and see if you can keep still.

  Infomercial aside, going to a Van Van concert meant two things. First, ponying up twenty CUC at the door, a price that few Cubans could afford. Second, arriving two hours early to stand in line.

  I offered to pay for Yosvany. For once, he accepted.

  “We never get to hear these guys live,” he said. “They play for tourists and jineteras.”

  Yosvany said this in apologetic tones. It wasn’t that he was above milking a yuma. He’d told me stories of five European novias and the gifts they’d given him. “But family is different. I’ve got your back and you’ve got mine, yeah, primo?”

  Best I could tell, he really meant it. That made me happier than I dared admit.

  The night of the concert, Yosvany told us, “You guys go wait in line. I’ve got to run an errand.”

  To which Ana said, “You mean to say, would you please hold a spot for me?”