Yankee Come Home

by William Craig

  Unfortunately, they were poorly led—and too late. Vernon put them ashore in mid-July. Wentworth, apparently overestimating Spanish numbers and worried about logistics, kept his troops moving slowly, converting the rude jungle tracks into roads. A recon party got to within sixteen miles of Santiago, but the main army was down and out by August. Two thousand were sick by the end of September. Disease spread to the ships, the expedition collapsed, and Vernon pulled out in early December. George’s elder half brother Lawrence Washington was one of the few lucky survivors among colonial volunteers, who suffered fever losses as high as 90 percent at Cartagena and Santiago.

  Despite these warning examples, Sampson settled down to a Cuban blockade in midsummer 1898, insisting that the Army make an amphibious assault somewhere along the coast of Oriente Province to solve the Navy’s problem. Never mind that the Spanish Navy had demonstrated its weakness and incompetence—or that the Spanish Army was composed of well-armed, dug-in, hard-fighting veterans of a long war. Never mind that the U.S. Army was utterly inexperienced in any operation larger and more amphibious than a company-size sniper shoot-out with desert Apaches. Never mind history and the calendar, hurricanes, yellow fever, malaria, and dengue.

  The Army was supposed to take the field, sacrificing itself to make Cervera’s fleet accept an open-water battle that the U.S. Navy couldn’t lose.

  In béisbol, that’s known as el squeeze play. Stateside, we call it a suicide squeeze.

  * * *

  On my way back from the fort I stopped at the postcard racks under the pavilions in front of the Restaurante El Morro. The selection was uninspiring. The views of the fort and other inescapable spots were mostly old, faded, and just plain bad, but not bad enough to be funny.

  The problem was, in the digital age, you usually can take better souvenir pics yourself. It’s the latest iteration of the problem that confronted Winslow Homer’s generation of artists. Back when wet-plate cameras could capture only still lifes and posed figures, Homer’s career received an early boost from selling Civil War sketches to Harper’s magazine. But photographic technology kept improving. Over the next few decades, drawing and painting were superseded as primary media for portraits and reportage. The War of 1898 was the last great battleground of that struggle, the last war to which leading American newspapers sent about as many sketch men—including artists as talented as Frederic Remington and Howard Chandler Christy—as they did photographers. There were even men wielding a new kind of camera, using reels of film to capture motion; the Spanish-American War was the first moving-picture war. Painting’s six-hundred-year reign as Western culture’s principal way of looking at itself was over.

  Because photography was still a highly specialized skill, the War of 1898—like the Civil War before it—brought thousands of newly enlisted American boys to photographers’ studios for portraits in their brand-new uniforms. My great-grandfather Thomas O’Brien posed for one.

  I have it on my desk at home: a scuffed and creased image affixed to a heavy card bearing the faux-gold imprint of Rution & Werbalsky, 120 Court St., Boston. Papa stands not quite straight, a slight young man somewhat awkward in his tight-buttoned tunic. He’s not looking straight at the camera—at us—but somewhere just over our shoulders and away. His feet seem awfully big, and his hands are veined, as if he has already done a lot of work for someone so young.

  But how old is he? Family legend says that he’s sixteen, that he lied about his age to enlist. But his baptismal certificate says he was born December 16, 1879, which would make him eighteen in 1898. That’s too young to enlist without his parents’ permission, which gives him reason to lie. If he hadn’t made a definitive break with his folks yet, this was it; once he returned from the war and got married, he never saw or mentioned his parents again. But eighteen is older than sixteen, which shows how a good story messes with fact. (Legend also insists that he was rejected for being a few pounds too light; he supposedly went to the nearest grocer’s, bought and ate several pounds of bananas, and marched back to the recruiting station.)

  The photo itself is a timepiece. Young Tom O’Brien stands in front of a “Cuban” backdrop painted with a sloppy impression of palm fronds and an exotic ironwork balcony. Verisimilitude is slightly enhanced by a real turned-wood plant stand at Tom’s elbow, which gives the backdrop a bit of 3-D projection. But Rution & Werbalsky must have been doing a brisk trade in military portraits, because the shot is carelessly composed. It includes the backdrop’s curling left edge and a bit of the studio wall behind. Perhaps they intended to crop the print before it was applied to the card, but in all the wartime excitement …

  This brings up one last, unanswerable question: For whom did Papa have this portrait made? Perhaps a very excited eighteen-year-old boy would have his portrait made to celebrate his escape from his family, to record his participation in history. But it seems still more likely that he would have had some recipient in mind. Were there more copies than the one we have? Did another one go to a sweetheart? Or to his mother, by way of good-bye?

  The scenic postcard flourished right up into the digital age, because most consumer-grade film cameras were good for portrait snapshots, but a truly evocative Grand Canyon view or Empire State Building souvenir required professional skills and equipment. Then digital cameras and imaging software democratized focus, cropping, and other arcana. Now that we’re all multimegapixel landscape photographers; the only wish-you-were-here postcard worth buying is a good reproduction of a painting.

  If not for the embargo, I imagined, someone would have made the Winslow Homer connection, and the racks outside El Morro would offer postcards of Searchlight on Harbor Entrance, Santiago de Cuba. Still, the stooped, thin woman behind the table of shell and bead jewelry was watching me with modest hope, so I picked out a couple of less-ugly cannon-and-coast views to send home as got-here-I’m-fine confirmations. Her smile was worth much more than I paid, and she was the first person that trip to greet me as a cubana may address a fortunate stranger.

  Buenas, mi amor, she said.

  Buenas, as in buenas días, “good day,” but why bother with specifics? Buenas—just wishing the plural of “good”—will do.

  Mi amor. My love.

  I bought a postcard, and she gave me love.

  In Stateside daily commerce, we’re still struggling with the touchy-feely implications of that New Age neologism “Have a nice day.” Old-school Mid-Atlantic Staters still offer “hon,” Southerners “honey” and “darlin’,” but I think Americans use these less as endearments than as something between a nickname and a bribe. When a waitress in Maryland asks, “What’ll you have, hon?” I don’t feel caressed. I feel managed.

  Everyday Cuban speech tends to be playful, allusive, and blunt. Your average individual Cuban may be no more honest than any other citizen of the world, but the culture of Cuban palaver is unabashedly direct.

  Like the time I was chatting with a young woman clerking at a bookstore when someone entered behind me. ¡Gordita! the clerk called, affectionately. “Little fatty!”

  I turned to see another young woman smiling and flouncing a hand at the clerk and the rest of the bookstore staff. Bodaciously round, she caught the epithet as if it were a bouquet and struck a quick beauty-queen pose. “Yes, I’m extra-sweet,” she admitted, with obvious self-satisfaction. I stepped out of the way as the friends built a quick catch-up conversation on a remark that would have ended some yanqui girls’ friendships forever.

  And then there was the day I brought my bottled water and biscuits to the cash register at a busy “dollar store.”

  These state-backed stores sell things Cubans can’t obtain with their ration books or the feeble monedas nacionales, the people’s money; dollar stores take only pesos convertibles, the semihard currency tourists receive in exchange for their yen, euros, and dollars. The state short-circuits legitimate private enterprise and redirects much of the black market’s energy by selling most of what Cubans want but can’t get from t
he government—everything from sweet-smelling soaps to sneakers to frozen fish to cameras to edible cheese and sectional furniture—at dollar stores. Ordinary Cubans have to save up their monedas nacionales to exchange for pesos convertibles at twenty-four to one. Lucky ones work in the tourist trade or have some other indirect, perhaps illegal connection to hard money.

  Anyway, it was late afternoon in Santiago, and the store was jammed with Cuban commuters buying groceries—canned goods, frozen meat—for bus and truck trips back to outlying villages. The young lady behind the counter was a character, bantering with each customer in line. When it was my turn, she looked up and said, ¡Ay, chino! ¿‘Tal? “Hey, Chinese guy! ‘Sup?”

  Now, my ancestry is seven-eighths west-county Irish and one-eighth Andalusian Spanish. I have dark hair, blue eyes, and freckles, but my Tipperary people passed on an eccentric gene for eyefold corners. A strong fold at the inner corner, the epicanthic fold, is common among people of East Asian descent; my folks’ eyes fold more strongly at the outer edge. An anthropologist might note the difference, but there were no anthropologists on my white-suburban elementary school playground, where I was often teased for having “Chinese eyes.” Still, it had been four decades since anyone had addressed me as, “Hey, chink!”

  I was so surprised that I asked, ¿Yo? ¿‘Chino’? “Me? Chinese?”

  ¡Sí! she insisted cheerily. Como … “Yes, like …” And she touched her fingers to her temples and stretched her skin back from her eyes.

  Everyone in the checkout line laughed, and I laughed, too. She clearly meant no insult to me or the great Chinese people. She just felt a Cuban freedom to comment on that most obvious and, in American life, taboo phenomenon: another person’s body. Chinese eyes, fatty, carrot-top, mulatto, skinny, sunburned, ugly, ripped, short, handsome, it wouldn’t have made any difference. She called it like she saw it, and all it meant was that that’s something she saw.

  Other latinos may comment on strangers’ skin color, weight, desirability, and probable sexual preferences with an unself-conscious accuracy you’ll rarely hear in the United States. It’s not just just a Cuban thing, but Cubans seem to sling it with extra style. And other latinos say mi amor, but Cuban small talk leaves extra room for love.

  Buenas, mi amor. “Good day, my love,” says the crafts-table compañera. How much love could there be in five minutes shared under a little roof without walls, one of us browsing through knickknacks and postcards, the other waiting, hoping for a sale? In an exchange of smiles and petty cash—and a few kind words either way?

  Enough. Some little bit of all the love in the world, which makes our living together bearable and even bright. Cuba’s poet-revolutionary José Martí understood love as an everyday need. It might be a grand passion, it might be a neighbor’s wave: Y sin pan se vive. Sin amor, ¡no! “Without bread, we live. Without love, no!”

  Walt Whitman described this love a thousand ways, the democratic love that underlies all “the pulling and hauling” of life’s transactions. He insisted “that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love.” In stark contrast to Teddy Roosevelt’s militant Americanism, desperate to draw lines and pick fights, Whitman celebrated an all-American surrender to the universal self we recognize in one another.

  Mi amor means I see you. It’s a Cuban compression of Whitman’s epic attempts to remind his fellow Yankees of the bodies under their clothes, the hearts under their ribs, the wishful spirits behind their self-reliant façades. Mi amor, I’m looking through this busy moment and the roles we’re playing and I see you. Money’s tight but love is free, and people who have little have all the more reason to cherish one another’s kindness, to love everything there is to love about friends and strangers. I see you and you’re doing your best, you’re not bad-looking, you’re sweet to that kid, you’re polite and respectful. I bet somebody loves you like chocolate and I’ve spoken for myself but that’s no reason not to say that I can see why. Mi amor. It’s honest and not really flirty. (When Cubans want to flirt, believe me, you’ll know it.) Mi amor is only an acknowledgment of what really makes the world go ’round.

  Whenever I leave Cuba, what I miss most is that answer to “What time is it?” or “Does the bus stop here?” or “Thanks for your help.”

  Las cinco y media, mi amor.

  Claro, mi amor.

  De nada, mi amor.

  I thanked the postcard lady and joined a few chorus members watching an old man roll cigars at his skinny-legged desk under a big shade tree. No one in this little group had been to Cuba before, and none of them was a cigar smoker. I told them I hadn’t been one either, until the day I’d first come to El Morro and met this same old guy at this same spot, working with hands as brown as the cured leaves that were as brown as the ancient desk.

  What did I know about cigars? Fortysomething years in the United States, and the only cigars I’d encountered were stink bombs and brush fires. What was the point? I just didn’t get it.

  But this old roller saw me watching him work, and called me closer with a glance as clever as his hands. Cubanos are terrific salesmen, hustlers eloquent even in mere eye contact. So we chatted a bit: ¿De que país? What country are you from?

  Los estados unidos. The United States.

  He offered the usual sympathetic nod and changed the subject, spieling off a little vocabulary lesson. Cigars are tabacs, fumas, or, fondly, puros, pure things. A cigar roller is a torcedor, a twister, for the movement that shapes the wrapper leaf in a running spiral. The wrapper this torcedor shaped with his chaveta—a no-handle knife with a dull back and a shallow sickle of blade—was maduro colorado, ripe red, which means it had cured to a rich, dark brown. He could create all kinds of shapes; displayed on the edge of his desk were chunky little robustos, long, thin lonsdales, taper-tipped torpedos, and even a cigar that doglegged out into a bowl like a pipa, a pipe. Most of his puros were simple coronas not quite six inches long, not quite half an inch wide. He rolled a few of these as we talked, trimming each wrapper, pinching up ropes of filler leaf, rolling the filler into the wrappers and the wrappers into coiling tubes that resolved into shag-end cylinders; cutting and tucking one end of each near thing into a seamless skullcap, slicing the other open and blunt with a stroke of his shuttling chaveta. The shape seemed to appear out of the leaves’ natural disorder like a loved one emerging from a crowd, not so much a making as a recognition. Then he handed his latest creation to me.

  Beautiful to see. Almost but not quite perfectly smooth, it was somehow more glowingly perfect than any flawless cigar could have been. It was an unpretentious work of art, inspired by itself, stating its own aesthetic. The leaf pressed back against my fingertips, springy and vital. It smelled like a dark, purple-shouldered tomato fresh-picked from my garden, its skin emitting a ripe alchemy of humus and manure and water and sunlight and chlorophyll. It smelled like food. I was amazed to think that it would burn.

  But the old man lit me up, and all that taking-up from the earth and photosynthesis and sap and slow curing atomized as smoke, and smoke was food. Food I could breathe. Puros. Cigars. I finally understood.

  The old torcedor didn’t remember me, but I was glad to see him still working. I bought his last five fresh-made tabacs, lit one, and got out of the way as the chorus folk followed through with more orders.

  Maricel joined us, and chorus members started asking us the rules about bringing cigars home. We were pretty sure you could still bring a hundred dollars’ worth of Cuban goods back under an OFAC license, but the problem was proving the value of your goods. A box of Montecristo cigars obtained from a black marketeer might cost thirty or forty dollars but be worth 350 dollars in Canada or Europe, and the U.S. Customs Service keeps tabs on the global market value of goods our stores aren’t allowed to sell. Get back to JFK and tell the Customs agent that you got your tabacs for forty dollars and he’ll take them away and do whatever the government does with confisca
ted cigars.

  Unless you have a receipt. Maricel and I knew some folks who’d gotten bargain goods through because they could document their purchase prices. She thought we should scout bookstores and dollar stores in Santiago for receipt books, or something like them, which might do the trick. But how likely was it that we’d find one?

  “Next time I’m coming down,” I said, scheming far into the future, “I’ll stop in New York and buy a Spanish receipt book.”

  Maricel laughed. “Now you’re thinking like a Cuban!”

  Chapter 6

  EL MORRO III: THE PITCHOUT

  Back at the bar, the game was still on, and Santiago’s Avispas were winning, 3–1. Faribundo was feeling no pain, and he wanted to buy me a drink. “Come on,” he said. “How about a cold Hatuey?” Oriente’s favorite beer is named for the Taino cacique who refused to go to any heaven with Spaniards in it.

  Gracias, no.

  “Then you must want rum!” Faribundo slapped his hand on the bar and shouted. His pal the bartender poured a rocks glass of lambent gold. The bottle looked expensive in a way that few things in Cuba do.

  I felt terrible. Lo siento, Faribundo, y muchas gracias, pero … no tomo alcohol. “I’m sorry, but I don’t drink.”

  It’s true. The problem might be my Irish genes—some of them belonging to Papa O’Brien, who lost plenty of debates with John Barleycorn before pledging abstinence in return for the survival of the woman he hit while driving drunk. Or the problem could be my character defects: the literature of Alcoholics Anonymous cites studies describing the typical drunk’s psyche as grandiose and oversensitive. Some alcoholics seem to be trying to regulate all that excess emotion with an all-purpose elixir, an exhilarating depressant. Maybe that’s me … or maybe I just liked it too much. For whatever reason, it had become apparent that if I wanted to stay upright, I had to put the bottle down. I hadn’t touched the stuff for years, and this was no time to renew our acquaintance, unless I wanted to spend the rest of this trip in whatever facility Cuba reserves for stumble-drunk foreigners.