The Ramos Brothers Trust Castro and Kennedy

by Roger Deblanck

  “What happened?” Juan tried calling over the wall, his heart racing.

  “Miguel’s hurt, malo!” hollered Benito. “Go tell tu madre.”

  By that time, Señorita Silvia had unlocked the gate of the guest quarters and came running from around the corner of the stuccoed wall, a robe wrapped around her shoulders and tied at her waist. Her novio followed close behind.

  “What are you boys doing?” she yelled at them.

  “Nothing,” said Juan, the shame clear as day on his blanched face.

  “Nada?” said the novio. “Up in a tree isn’t nothing.”

  “Our friend’s hurt,” said Alberto, his head down, his eyes diverted with shame.

  “Donde está? Where is he?” asked Señorita Silvia.

  “The other side,” said Juan.

  “I’m going to get Lucretia,” said Señorita Silvia.

  The brothers said nothing as their former teacher hustled to the house and pounded on the back door. Lucretia came running when she heard Silvia’s voice. “What has happened?” shrieked Lucretia, her eyes darting around.

  “One of your son’s friends has fallen from a tree,” said a frantic Silvia.

  “Ay, Dios mío!” declared Lucretia.

  As she put her hands to her head, Florencio walked in the door. Seeing Señorita Silvia and her novio—Rafael Nuñez—at the house at that hour, he knew something was the matter. Informed of the events, Florencio rushed around the block to the house on the opposite street, which shared an adjacent wall with his property. He knocked on the door and explained the situation. The elderly owner of the home went with Florencio to investigate the backyard, and sure enough they found an injured Miguel attended to by Benito.

  When Florencio took one look at Miguel’s arm, he knew he had to take the boy to a doctor. By the time they loaded into the Oldsmobile and headed for the home office of Dr. Muñoz, Florencio thought about what punishment should befall his sons for acting as accomplices in climbing their neighbor’s tree with the intent to spy. He could tell from the shameful looks on his sons’ faces that they sensed the stupidity of their actions.

  When he pulled up to Dr. Muñoz’s office, however, the residence was lightless, vacated. Florencio pulled the break and put the baby blue Oldsmobile in neutral. He got out and approached the door. A piece of paper had been pegged up with a tiny nail. Written in Dr. Muñoz’s own hand, the note stated that he had moved his practice to Colón. The notice apologized for any inconvenience, but gave no reason for his sudden departure from Havana.

  Although Florencio trusted Dr. Muñoz more than any other médico, he had to rush Miguel to Havana Central Hospital that evening in the spring of 1953. Not until the doctors on duty attended to Miguel’s broken forearm did Florencio have a moment to consider why Dr. Muñoz would pack up and relocate his practice without any indication he was doing so.

  Cuba was, of course, going through a harsh stretch of political mayhem. Havana was becoming a dangerous place of gangster-like violence. But sabotage bombs and target shootings of party rivals forever seemed distant from the populace, a normal part of Cuba’s corrupt and chaotic political heritage. Nothing was ever smooth or peaceful about governing the island. Someone was always irate; someone was always plotting to take over. Nothing new in that regard. However, since Batista cancelled elections in March and declared himself the head of state, the current wave of unrest augured something bigger, something different, something more spectacular, something more foolish than past political battles. Dr. Muñoz was now in his early sixties. He’d seen a lot in his years, and maybe the current bedlam in the city had pushed his patience past the brink of tolerance. Maybe he just had to take his practice out of the city, which seemed to have no conscience? I can’t blame the old médico for that, Florencio thought. Fleeing for conscience, taking a stand by stepping away, he’s wiser than any of us. Whatever his reason for taking off, the Ramos family now lacked a doctor, and a damn good one to be certain.

  The doctors at Havana Central Hospital set the break in Miguel’s forearm. They then placed the arm in a cast, from elbow to wrist. He would stay that way for at least six weeks, the same duration of time Florencio imposed as punishment upon the Ramos brothers. First, they had to apologize to Señorita Silvia for trying to spy on her. Then over the course of the next month and a half, the brothers had to come straight home from school at Santa Dominicana, and they were not allowed outside once they got in. They couldn’t see Benito and Miguel outside of school, nor could they talk on the phone, listen to the radio, or play baseball. In addition, Florencio confiscated Juan’s atlases and comic books and locked Alberto’s banjo in a closet. As part of their punishment, they were assigned daily tasks, which Cuca usually finished. They washed and dried dishes, scrubbed floors, vacuumed carpets, and wiped windows. They collected all the trash and shined the school furniture. Then they were sent to their rooms and told to complete their homework. They were to make no noise. “We better not hear you,” said their father.

  Although the brothers accepted the punishment brought down on them from their father, they hated that their mother took part in the decision-making. They detested listening to orders from her, not because they didn’t feel guilty about the shame they caused, but because their mother never cared one way or another. She was more upset how the incident may affect her image and not what her sons’ behavior might indicate. Instead of back-talking and exacerbating the problem as he’d done in the past, Juan accepted his punishment, whether from father or mother. Likewise Alberto felt bad about the whole incident. This made them equally obedient to whatever their father told them to do. They were glad, however, that their father had the task of lecturing them on their conduct. They were contrite and pledged to do better. “You’re good sons,” Florencio told them. “Just a little ornery and full of energy at your age. But I need you to think about consequences, and if what you’re doing feels wrong, you must choose otherwise. Do what’s right. Entienden.”

  “Sí, father, we understand.”

  “Bien. Now this soon will pass. I know you both will do better in the future.”

  To make certain they knew how to make better decisions, for a month after the incident their mother stood in their doorways before they went to bed and forced them to their knees to confess their sins and pray for forgiveness. “By next year, Juan, you will receive confirmation. You will then go to confession. Father Ballesteros may choose not to absolve you. So you better shape up. I warn you,” she said.

  Similarly, she spoke to Alberto, “You’re not far behind your brother. You cannot grow up causing trouble. You two were never raised this way. I’m very disappointed in you.”

  “Disappointed in you!” the brothers thought. How they would love to cram the statement back in her face, down her throat. But they didn’t. They bided their time and looked to el futuro. Something must give.

  * * *

  Chapter 10

  Over those six long weeks of their grounding, the only change in the day-to-day routine came for Juan, when his teacher, Señora Consuelos, announced a class field trip to la Universidad de Havana. With sixth grade marking the last year of primary education before students matriculated to middle school for seventh and eighth grade, the administration at Santa Dominicana planned for sixth graders to visit la universidad as an opportunity for them to think about their future, about a career path they might pursue someday. Juan and Benito had been paired together since the beginning of the school year because they expressed an interest in law. They would, therefore, spend the day of their field trip on a tour of the School of Law.

  When the school bus arrived at the university campus, representatives from each college greeted the sixth grade estudiantes. A young man in his early twenties by the name of Gonzalo Campos introduced himself to Juan, Benito, and two others, another boy and a girl from their class, who also expressed interest in the field of law. Gonzalo took the four to the law department and showed them around the college, where the dean had
an office and where academic advisors shared a building. They were then allowed to sit through a course lecture and watch how hardworking law students took notes and asked questions. Afterwards, they toured a wing of classrooms called the Hall of Martyrs, where the tiled hallways and corridors echoed with the shuffling and clacking sound of visitors’ footsteps. In the Hall on both sides of the walls, they viewed framed portraits of some of the most hallowed and revered heroes of Cubano and South American history, among them José Martí and Simon Bolivar. Finally, they were shown around the law library, where row after row of volumes with gilded pages lined bookcases that rose to the ceiling and required a stepstool or ladder to reach certain texts that were higher up on the top shelves. The enormous center of the library featured a carpeted open area with rectangular wooden tables, arranged in five rows of three, four estudiantes to a table, nearly all chairs occupied with studiers, future protectors of the law, each quiet and buried in their texts and notes.

  As the four students from Santa Dominicana followed Gonzalo on their guided tour around the library, Benito pinched Juan’s arm to gain his attention. When Juan turned to face his friend, Benito’s eyes were opened wide and staring with excitement. He pointed down an aisle of books to where a tall, handsome man with dark, wavy hair and a thinly-trimmed mustache—the rest of his face was cleanly shaven—had stopped and removed a tome-sized volume from a shelf. He leaned gently against the steel railing of the shelf with the thick book propped open to fit within the fold of his left palm. He had his head bent down to read, his right finger guiding his focus along a line. Engrossed in the text’s content, his brow was creased with a look of erudition and curiosity. Watching the man, Benito whispered to Juan, “Mira, I think that’s Fidel. Do you know who he is?”

  “Fidel?” Juan knew. “Sí, Cuca’s cousin told stories to me and my brother about him.”

  “Sí,” replied Benito, “I have also heard stories about Fidel from my father. He is loyal to Fidel’s revolutionary politics. I saw my father talking to him late one night when he came to my house.”

  “Qué . . . ?” Juan was about to ask Benito a question.

  “Muchachos, you must remain quiet in la biblioteca,” said Gonzalo, noticing that Juan and Benito were engaged in a conversation about something or someone down one of the rows of book stacks.

  With the rustle of the boys’ voices distracting him, Fidel turned his head and peered down the aisle. He noticed the two youngsters staring back at him. He ran his right index finger over his finely-manicured mustache and grinned at the boys, his brow no longer a crease of studious intensity, but now rather a visage of affability, of approachability. He closed the book he had been perusing and walked towards them.

  When he was close enough to converse in a low voice, he said to them, “Young revolutionaries.”

  “Are you Fidel Castro?” asked Benito, his mouth agape.

  “Yo soy. And how do I know you?”

  “You don’t. Not really. But you know mi padre, Max Carbonal.”

  “Of course, a dear hombre, a loyal amigo. So this is his how I meet his hijo.” Fidel extended his hand for Benito to shake. “An honor to meet Max’s son. I’ve heard him talk about you on many occasions.”

  “This is mi amigo, Juan,” said Benito, shaking Fidel’s hand in a moment of awe and nodding towards his friend.

  After finishing his handshake with Benito, Fidel turned his attention to Juan and also offered his hand. Juan lifted his arm slowly and realized his hand was trembling when Fidel’s huge palm reached out and engulfed his clammy fingers, unsure of how to grip back.

  “It’s a pleasure,” said Fidel.

  Juan detected a relaxed firmness in Fidel’s grip, but he remained speechless and stared up into the intense fervor in the man’s eyes. His nerves, though, continued to clash with anxiousness to ask, to confirm, that, yes indeed, the man before him was also the same man he and Alberto had seen a year ago staggering out of the waves, raking at his ribcage, falling to the sand to dig a hole, holding his hands to the sky as though offering his heart to the sun on Guardalavaca Beach.

  With his hand locked and his eyes engaged with Fidel’s, Juan felt as though something simultaneous was happening to them both. He watched as Fidel’s dark eyes drifted towards something in the distance and then refocused, an image becoming visible, a shared memory triggered between them in their moment of shaking hands. Fidel blinked and was transported back to that day on the beach: the clouds shaped like orange castles, the hole in the ground . . . Juan’s eyes twitched and he too found his mind filled with images from that same morning in Guardalavaca: the sun’s rays exploding in the color of a sliced-up pineapple, the gull high up in the tree . . .

  Having just finished swimming laps in the emerald waters, Fidel had been vertiginous, his eyes foggy and burning from the salt in the sea. He had slogged to his burgundy towel on the shore and smelled the richness of ground coffee beans emanating from one of the small timber shacks made of uneven, rain-stained planks and cheap tin for corrugated roofing. Those were the domicilios of his fellow Cubanos. “Dios mío, have grace on them,” he had whispered to himself.

  Then, with warm sea water dripping from his body, Fidel remembered how he had felt his skin soften to the moistness of the wet sand. That morning he realized he could dig into himself if he wanted. He could become someone other—someone like Cuba’s next José Martí, the island’s most revered patriot of independencia.

  So with his fingernails, he had raked gently at his upper abdomen and seen how easily he could make knifelike furrows in his skin. His mind then became flooded with visions of leading un revolución, of ousting the dictator Fulgencio Batista. At that transformative moment on the beach, he tore away doubts of flesh and peeled away chunks of earthly indecision.

  And so he had dug, determined to connect his heart with that of Martí. He pierced his right finger deep into his ribcage and used his left hand to burrow a passage into his chest. “Ay, Dios mío!” he remembered exhaling aloud as he twisted and writhed his fingers towards his corazón. He then made contact, swaddling his cupped palm around the laboring chambers, the ventricles secured in a firm grip. He could now begin to rip his heart free.

  Once he had the bloody, oozing organ out of his body, he lifted it above his head towards the pulsating sun. The force of Martí’s spirit in that instant had powered his next thought: the joining of compañeros on the sun-combed shore of their beloved Cuba.

  With his right hand cradling his heart, he had collapsed to his knees, and with his left hand he had scooped a hole in the damp sand. He saw something beating inside and reached in to make the exchange: his hero’s corazón for that of his own. There seemed to be no lapse between the present and past, the rebirth of Martí’s heart now drummed as a cathedral bell within him, a call from a messenger ghost declaring Fidel’s mission.

  As Fidel relived how that morning had transpired, he remembered seeing two boys in his periphery, two youngsters witnessing his epiphany. Alas, the sands had convulsed, the past had arrived in a feverland. A sea gull had squawked and shot above his head like a missile. The waves had roared, the foam exploding like bags of sugar. And the sun had loomed immortal, a halo spotlighting upon the stage of Cuba in the years to come . . .

  Juan watched with interest as Fidel’s eyes drifted through these moments of reflection. And in Fidel’s presence—first on the beach and now in the library—Juan felt encircled in an electric sphere of confidence, a magnetism that enlisted loyalty and sacrifice from anyone under Fidel’s influence. Regaining his focus, Fidel suddenly shifted his dark eyes, full of clarity and zeal, from Juan to make contact with Gonzalo. The two men shared a moment of recognition, an acknowledgement that they knew each other, stood united together, had trust in one another. Fidel then returned his attention warmly back to Juan. He was certain now that somehow he had seen the boy before because a mere handshake from the joven had transported him back to reliving his epiphany on the beach in Guardalavaca.
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br />   “It has been a pleasure to meet a young rebel,” said Fidel to Juan. “Lo siento, I must leave you now. I have serious business to attend to.”

  Gonzalo called his group back to attention, and Fidel disappeared around the book stacks. As Gonzalo led them through the remainder of their tour in the library, Juan and Benito searched around to see where Fidel had gone. Whichever way they looked, they could not catch sight of him. But his energy remained fervent and intoxicating with the feeling you gain from someone you would follow even if you weren’t certain where he was leading.

  Just after twelve thirty, the entire class of sixth graders reunited for lunch in the university’s cafeteria. They were served roasted pollo with rice and tall glasses of lemonade for refreshments. Caramelos were handed out for dessert. When they finished eating, they were allowed to sit outside along the top of University Hill and talk with their friends. Juan and Benito found a perfect spot to lounge in the shade under an enormous ficus tree. The smell of tobacco wafted strongly in the air. Benito began to talk about how his father had been hinting to him that he and many others supported Fidel’s call for action.

  “I wonder whether something is going to happen,” said Benito.

  “What do you mean?” asked Juan.

  “That the revolutionaries are going to strike against Batista’s unconstitutional government.”

  “Where’d you learn to say stuff like that?”

  “From my father. It’s revolutionary talk.”

  Juan then described to Benito what he remembered of Fidel on the beach: how he clawed at his chest, how he dug in the sand. As they continued their conversation, they noticed a large group of men going through a coordinated set of exercises on the grassy field below. A leader hollered out directions in the abrasive tone of a drill sergeant, and the men responded accordingly. They ran in place, then stretched and touched their toes, holding their position for several seconds, before dropping to the ground for twenty repetitions of push-ups. Juan and Benito could see the sweat glisten on the faces of the men, looks of seriousness and determination, as they carried out the orders of what exercise to perform next.