The Ramos Brothers Trust Castro and Kennedy

by Roger Deblanck

  The brothers traded baseball cards on the trip and enjoyed the scenery across Cuba for the first time in their lives. On the outskirts of Havana, they witnessed the slums full of beat-up, makeshift shacks located near garbage heaps that steamed with the stench of pig manure. Outside the city, the train passed along the stunning northern coastline of Matanzas, where the famous beach resort at Varadero came into view, the frequenting grounds of Cuba’s los ricos. Heading south through the valleys and hills that separated the coast from the red soil plains of Cuba’s interior, they stopped at Santa Clara, a colonial town of villas and botanical gardens, a town not far from Colón where Dr. Manu Muñoz would soon move his medical practice. Onward before noon, they reached Ciego de Ávila, a city surrounded by savannas and sugarcane fields, the sweet smell of guarapo and molasses filling the air. Beyond the fields towards Las Tunas, there ranged cattle farms and pastures with steer grazing. And for the last leg of the ride to Holguín, the sunset glowed the color of a giant, sliced-up pineapple with a halo of dripping juices streaking the horizon with citrus hues of yellow and orange. The colors reflected across the sands at Guardalavaca, Esmerald, and Pesquero. The boys began to yawn with tiredness.

  When the train came to rest at the Holguín station, nightingales and woodpeckers could be heard chirping from trees under the dipping sun. Cuca scanned the cab window for her parents and saw them looking lost as they waited for her and the boys to disembark. Dragging her damaged leg down the train’s corridor to the exit, she nudged the Ramos brothers forward. As they lugged their suitcases, Cuca’s mother, Nera Rivera, spotted them and ran to her daughter and shouted with joy. The boys stood to Cuca’s side and witnessed the embrace of mother and child. They each considered how their own mother had never shown them such unbridled adoration. Cuca quickly introduced the Ramos brothers to her mother, and the boys thanked Señora Rivera for letting them be guests.

  “I hear you two have been very brave in battling your illness,” said Cuca’s mother. “We’re glad you’re here, and you’ll enjoy the upcoming days on the beautiful sands of la playa.”

  Cuca’s father loaded their luggage into his donkey-drawn wagon, and the family headed the remaining distance to Guardalavaca. The wagon rumbled along dusty lanes and whipped up the lazy topsoil and sawdust from the forest lumber. Goats and roosters roamed free, and the odor of animal intestines fresh from slaughter hung in the air. They reached the Riveras’ two-bedroom cabin an hour before midnight. During the ride, the boys had fallen asleep, one on each of Cuca thighs, as she stretched out her legs in the back of the wagon. Cuca’s father lifted Juan while her mother carried Alberto into the house and laid them down on the straw-stuffed beds prepared for them.

  Everyone slept until the new sun rose with the incumbent morning. Cuca’s mother prepared a pot of coffee for her husband, Fernando, who headed to work at one of Angel Castro’s fields. When the boys woke, they ate toasted biscuits and sliced mangos for breakfast. After eating, Cuca gathered together a picnic basket with pollo sandwiches and plátanos and headed with the brothers to the beach. The boys carried their towels and followed as Cuca walked to the edge of town, where houses made of wattle had red-tile roofs. Within a quarter of an hour, they hitched on the back of an oxen-pulled cart, and another half hour later they jumped off and headed for Playa Guardalavaca. Cuca’s cousin Victor Mendez and his wife Anabel had built a small shack not far from the shore. Victor worked off-and-on when needed for Angel Castro, but he and his wife lived a simple life near the beach, so they needed very little.

  For the next several days, the boys basked in the sunshine. Their skin absorbed the healing juices of the midday hour and dried out any pesky remnants of sickness that may try to nest in their bodies. If they were not running along the white sands or splashing in the emerald waves as Cuca watched on, the boys enjoyed the baseball field not far from the shack.

  For several nights in a row, Victor and the boys roasted chunks of pork and toasted coconut wedges over little campfires on the beach. The dry twigs and chaff crackled in hymns. The embers from the fire glowed into the sky like ghosts and joined the stars, flickering as though they were fireflies in the heavens. With the night a glittering cathedral above them, the brothers’ faces shone with excitement as Victor told them stories of Angel Castro’s sons, in particular the gifted and outspoken Fidel.

  “Fidel is a lively spirit, full of great energy and desire to follow through with whatever he says,” explained Victor. “When I was young, I used to play with him. He was a tremendous athlete in soccer, basketball, and baseball. Yes, he loved baseball like you two do. When he turned fourteen, he went away to high school, and I heard he was voted best athlete his senior year. After he finished his diploma, he went to la universidad. I’m sure he used his amazing memory to ace every examen. He can look at something one time and memorize it immediately. He’s an expert at whatever he puts his mind to.”

  “Wow,” said Juan, “I want to meet him.”

  “He’s probably in Havana, I suppose,” said Victor, pausing. “Strange how he is from this side of the island, and you two are from there, and yet you’ve swapped places.”

  “Does Fidel ever visit back here?” asked Juan.

  “Yeah, sometimes, pienso. Who knows, maybe you’ll see him this week?”

  “What does he do in Havana?” asked Alberto.

  “As far as I know, he’s now a lawyer.”

  “I want to be a lawyer someday, too,” said Juan.

  “Maybe someday you’ll be like Fidel,” jested Victor.

  “That’d be cool,” said Juan.

  Victor laughed. “Fidel wants to run for a position in the government, you see. He wants to change many things that have gone wrong in Cuba for muchos años. It’s very complicated, but Fidel feels strongly about wanting to make a difference. I will give him my vote.”

  “Can he really change the way things are in our country?” asked Juan, a concerned crease forming in his brow as he scrunched his eyebrows inward.

  “Oh, I don’t know. But if he believes in his mission, I believe he can make a difference.”

  “Our abuelos, Huberto and Evelina, left for America because they don’t like it here anymore,” Alberto spoke up.

  “I can understand why,” said Victor. “Still, it will take a strong man, many strong men perhaps, to change decades of entrenched corruption.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Alberto.

  “That people in the government are taking what doesn’t belong to them. They are not serving the people the way they should be.”

  “Maybe Fidel can change that,” said Juan.

  “I hope,” mulled Victor.

  They savored their pork and suckled their crisped coconut wedges and told more stories. As they did so, Juan watched as Cuca exited the shack and went up the shore to rummage through the dense plant brush. She began to collect an assortment of leaves, petals, and herbs. Juan got up from the campfire and followed her, asking her what she was gathering. She told him “important ingredients.” When he asked what sorts, she said foliage from “a magic plant.” She went on to explain that the plant she sought only grew out there near Guardalavaca, a splendid spot on the island where the Caribbean shore produced natural medicines. A spot where the sun seemingly climbed out of the gilded lips of the horizon and blessed each day with health and goodness. A spot where the clouds over the shore lingered in orange hues like foggy castles and gave prosperity to the emerging dawn. A spot where the emerald waves whooshed smoothly onto the infinite white sands of the beach and cleansed all ills. This, Cuca declared, was where magic substances for healing could be found, magic for saving lives. “I don’t know when I’ll be back here again,” said Cuca. “So I must take as much of the medicine as I can. Just in case someday.”

  She turned to look at Juan, his pudgy face half lit from the glow of the writhing campfire in the distance. He smiled back and then watched her pull the yellow strings tight on a tiny blue pouch, her earthly pharmaceu
ticals safe and sealed for whenever sickness may strike again.

  The next morning as the sun began its arc over the horizon, Juan and Alberto darted out the rackety door of Victor and Anabel’s shack. The door flapped and clacked shut behind them as they raced across the shore towards the old baseball field beyond the shacks. As they tracked footprints across the beach, a sea gull squawked and soared like a missile above their heads. Its zooming flight seemed to stir up the sea’s mist and intensify the waves’ crashing. The white foam spread out on the shore the way loaded bags of sugar split down the middle. Waiting for the gull to perch on a palm, the brothers stopped and then looked out into the distance where, drenched in a beam of light, staggered a man onto the sands. He looked to have heaved up through the waves and was now laboring towards a burgundy towel set out on the shore, his wet feet caked with sand.

  The brothers watched as the tall, burly man with dark, wavy hair wiped sea water from his cleanly-shaven face and then dropped to his towel. It looked as though he was trying to dig into himself with his fingers. He raked gently with his nails in the region of his chest where his heart was lodged. As drops of emerald sea water fell from his black hair, he squinted up at the awakening yellow—muy amarillo—of the tropic sun. He then proceeded again to claw at his ribcage, this time with both his hands, almost as though he were trying to burrow a hole into himself. As the man twisted his fingers against his chest, Juan and Alberto heard him utter out loud—“Ay, Dios mío!”—that same phrase their mother often used.

  The brothers felt hypnotized as the day was now abloom with the sweet wafting scent of sliced mangos and split coconuts mixing with the freshly-brewed redolence of morning coffee emanating from the shack of Victor and Anabel. They could feel the humid heat. The Caribbean day was a damp sponge oozing upon them.

  They continued to watch as the man on the beach now steadied himself on his haunches, and with his left hand he began to scoop up the damp sand next to his towel and dig a small hole. He peered down into the hole, inspecting something inside. Then he reached in and acted as though he were exchanging on object in the hole for something in his chest—as though his corazón were in the sand. He then tamped the sand back over the hole. Finally, as if he were holding an object, he hoisted his hands in the air towards the sun, towards the high royal palm in the distance, where the gull had perched. The fronds of the palm were so lush and green—muy verde—that they formed a canopy of turquoise shadows over the rows of decrepit timber shacks along the shore. The man uttered some indecipherable words, attempting to speak to someone nearby. The brothers looked on as the man remained oblivious of them, so they thought.

  “I wonder what he’s doing,” said Alberto. Juan just stared at the man. “I wonder who he is?” asked Alberto.

  “I know who he must be,” said his brother.

  * * *

  Chapter 8

  The first week of August a blistering billow of heat slapped the island into torpor. Juan and Alberto returned to Havana by way of the same train route that took them to Guardalavaca a month earlier. And just as their father shed tears when they left from Estación Central, he stood on the same wooden platform to welcome them home with the same lachrymosity. He tried to hold back his teary emotions of joy, but drops clouded his eyes, rinsing away the days of separation from his sons. He pulled them close and lavished praise of how well they looked with their tans, the sun having done wonders in restoring their strength. The boys, for their part, were skittish with excitement as they described the white sands of the beach, the campfire stories they heard from Cuca’s cousin Victor, the baseball field they played at beyond the shacks, and the strange man they saw clutching at his heart on the shore. About to choke up with gratitude, Florencio said to Cuca, “Gracias for watching over them these many weeks.”

  “Está mi suerte vida, my lucky life,” she said.

  With a month of summer remaining before school started, the brothers tried to stay out of their mother’s way. During her sons’ time away, Lucretia grew used to the big house nearly empty, quiet time in which she conceived her new business venture. She gave the boys only casual hugs to welcome them home before declaring she had “work to do” and secluding herself in her office. The brothers learned that her “work to do” involved the opening of her own beauty salon in central Havana. With their mother preoccupied and their father gone back to long hours at Andurra Azúcar, the boys utilized their free days to play baseball and pursue their other interests. In the evenings after dinner, in which one or both of their parents were usually absent from the table, Juan liked to find a quiet place to study his atlases and also read his new passion, comic books. He became thrilled with the hero stories of Superman and Batman. He absorbed their adventures of fighting bad guys and understood their heroic deeds as exemplary of men standing up for the justice of others. In Juan’s mind, he wanted one day to emulate the uprightness of these fictional characters through the powers afforded him by the law. So he dreamed of speaking in a courtroom someday and defending the rights of the unprotected against the oppressors. He also wondered if Fidel—who Juan was certain must have been the man he and Alberto saw on the beach—would pursue the same virtues as a lawyer or leader?

  For Alberto, besides practicing his pitches from one corner of the plate to another, his other passion remained music. He strummed his banjo every night and tinkered with new songs. He sang of longing and loneliness, a wounded tenderness that concealed a flat edge of resent towards both his mother and father, as their choices in life never made him and his brother more important than other things: their father with his incessant work schedule and their mother with her ceaseless fixation on her clothes, hair, and nails. The lyrics from one of his songs went:

  What you make importante

  Puts other things aside

  Make sure you take notice

  Before life passes you by

  As the boys saw little of their parents, they looked to their friends. That school year, the start of Juan’s sixth grade at Santa Dominicana, he befriended Benito Carbonal. Benito wore a buzz cut and had a faint scar like a checkmark running from the tip of his right eyebrow across his temple. Their teacher, Señora Consuelos, paired up students the first week of school based on their responses to future career interests. Juan wrote down on his information card that he wanted to be “un abogado,” a lawyer, while Benito jotted out a possible career in “legal concerns.” Benito clarified what he meant by stating that his father worked on “the politics that go along with those legal concerns.” No one in sixth grade knew what the heck Benito referred to when he used the word “politics,” but it sounded cool, so everyone assumed Benito’s father did something muy importante.

  What Señora Consuelos, la maestra, deemed most important was that Juan and Benito shared similar interests. So she paired them up for the semester to work together on projects pertaining to career development in the legal field. These projects included oral and written reports along with reading assignments outside of school focused on the subject of law. As school partners, Juan and Benito developed a solid friendship built on the similarity that they both liked to express their opinions. Benito often mentioned his father, Señor Max Carbonal, but Juan never saw or met him. When Juan asked about Señor Carbonal, Benito replied that his father was always “at work.” This fact resonated with Juan because his own father, too, was always preoccupied at the office.

  Early on in their friendship, Juan detected how Benito sought to carry out his own personalized view of justice. “I want to confront injustice just like my father,” he said. “I want to fight for my rights and the rights of others.” Benito’s sense of right presumed that if you were struck, you should not back down or turn aside. Instead, you should thrust your cheek back against your opponent and return greater force than you received. Once Juan introduced Benito to his brother, Alberto also became a lackey of Benito’s role as self-appointed enforcer of carrying out schoolyard justice. In a similar fashion to the errant knig
ht Don Quixote and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, if Benito was the Don, then both Juan and Alberto served as different halves of Sancho—Juan as the faithful supporter; Alberto as the wise negotiator. A burgeoning rebel was what Benito wanted to be, and while Juan walked side by side the enforcer, Alberto sought to keep a leash on their new friend.

  Typical cliques developed at Santa Dominicana and Benito had his posse, with Juan and Alberto closest in his circle. Benito never discouraged other boys from forming their own groups. In fact, he found it cool when the schoolyard functioned like a place at peace with everybody doing their own thing and hanging out with their own amigos. But as soon as Benito got word about anyone suffering a putdown or an insult, he stepped in. Moreover, if he became aware of a bullying incident, he intervened on behalf of the victim by confronting the culprit. Benito’s status was not often tested. For the first half of the school year, the cafeteria and playground followed unwritten rules of respect and tolerance. That status quo became challenged when a new kid arrived and quickly tested the parameters.

  Miguel Leozuma started school at Santa Dominicana the week after New Year’s, 1953. He was taller than anyone on campus, and he had shoulders wider than anyone his age. But he stood out mainly because his robust upper body supported a tiny head. Every student had at one time thought the same thing: that he looked like a little Frankenstein monster. Miguel knew what students must be thinking about his appearance, yet no one ever snickered an insult towards him. Regardless, Miguel’s insecurity made him strut around campus with his wide pair of shoulders that he bent to nobody. When a walkway was tight, he made it tighter and forced the other kids to slip by. Whenever possible, he bumped into others and added a little extra push to show he was boss. For two weeks, Miguel tried to build fear among his subordinates. Finally, Benito took charge. He assigned Juan and Alberto the job of tallying up the grievances against Miguel from other students. When they reported back to Benito that over two dozen incidents had been cited as acts of Miguel’s aggression, Benito prepared to confront the new school bully.