Yankee Come Home

by William Craig

  It was an odd link, but it made me feel connected to the Oscar who used to sleep there.

  He was Yolanda’s son, the third boy in his generation of Luceros to be named after Maricel’s martyred father. This Oscar might have been a little wild. The only picture of him that I ever saw—the one that hung over the bed—showed a young man with a still-spotty mustache and a reckless grin. His face looked a little worn for his age. The picture was taken the year he died in a car crash at age twenty-seven. That was almost two decades ago.

  You might say that the Luceros, having lost the original Oscar to Batista’s torturers, his widow and daughter to the Revolution and America, and so many other loves and ties to the wild oscillations of Cuba’s fate, can get through anything. It’s certainly true that Yolanda still knows how to smile, that her daughters Mari and Yoli laugh with a warmth that could ripen fruit. But even if you never caught Yolanda alone in the kitchen, staring at nothing, or noticed the way Yoli dotes on the boyishness in men, the feeling that lingers in his little room would tell you how much Oscar is missed. When there’s no guest in the house, Yolanda sleeps there. His picture hangs over the bed, centered on the headboard, where a Catholic would hang a crucifix.

  I didn’t have any trouble sleeping there, but my dreams weren’t my own. They wandered Havana, pretending to a geographic intimacy I didn’t possess, taking me on trips to unknown neighborhoods. I flew over the city’s parks and alleys as I used to fly through my suburban Connecticut neighborhood in childhood dreams, not effortlessly aloft but swimming hard just to stay housetop high in too-thin air. One morning, I woke sweaty from such exertions, possessed by the thought that Oscar and I had been about the same age: that if he had lived, he’d be the almost-fifty-year-old man sleeping in this kids’ bed. It was as if someone had done the math for me while I slept.

  Whoever sleeps in Oscar’s room wakes up to no one’s dream. The louvers admit a fractional sunlight and slapping echo that always reminded me I was on the ground floor of a five-story apartment block, sleeping by windows that opened onto a space bound by four such blocks. This oversized air shaft might have been designed as a modest courtyard, but the Soviet-inspired architects’ original intentions were hard to discern.

  The blocks were a mix of Homo sovieticus severity and tropical adaptations: open-patterned cinderblock, wood and glass louvers. They may have looked tidy and promising when new, but three decades’ rough wear—accelerated during the Special Period, after the collapse of Soviet support—had transformed promise to premature senility: cracks and missing chunks of concrete, three-story water stains, broken louvers, graffiti, assorted add-on bars for doors and windows. And not all the dysfunction could be blamed on time, crime, and neglect. Defeat was built into the way the graceless buildings had been strewn across the landscape in clusters so random that even lifelong residents often can’t give directions to addresses less than fifty meters from their own. There were few or no street signs, not even numbers on the side of most housing blocks. Walking or, worse yet, trying to guide a taxi through the maze, I sometimes imagined that confusion so thorough must have been deliberate. How could good intentions, be they ever so inept, have produced such a powerful sense of isolation, of the impossibility of concerted action? But then I’d remember the projects of Roxbury and South Boston, of East L.A. and Miami. Oppression is so easy, people everywhere accomplish it without even trying.

  Of course, Cuban ingenuity always finds ways to fight back. The courtyard or air shaft—whatever that space enclosed between our several housing blocks was meant to be—had become an eighth-acre farm. Chickens, ducks, turkeys, and even pigs scratched and rooted around vegetable plots beneath a low canopy of banana, mango, and guava trees. Raising protein and produce against the system’s perpetual shortages, the air shaft garden was a modest triumph, but its messy, primal success clashed with the buildings’ modernity. In this Nowheresville on Havana’s periphery, even the rooster’s crow stirred echoes of failure.

  Oscar’s room was, for a short while, my bedroom and my office, the place where I wrote up each day’s notes and edited photos. The Luceros made a gift of the room’s privacy, but one or another of the adults and kids popped in every now and again to see if I needed anything, often staying to chat. The room seemed the right place to ask David to tell his story.

  Mari’s only child and Yolanda’s only grandson, David lives with his mother and stepfather in a neighborhood that’s part of the city proper. Mari is a lawyer for the government petroleum agency; her husband, Lionel, has a good bureaucratic job. They are valued members of society. Mari’s agency even sends a bus around to collect its people, but she prefers to commute on a heavy old electric moped, despite the difficulty of carrying it up to their third-floor apartment. More convenient, more prosperous than Yolanda’s suburb, their neighborhood is a mix of old and new, of full-floor apartments and even some single-family houses. The fruit of backyard fruit trees is a luxury, not a subsistence crop.

  With good housing in short supply, it’s not unusual for grown children to live with family. Good jobs also are scarce. Even highly ambitious young people may never find satisfying work or homes of their own. David is just over thirty and works as a minor public functionary. He might be satisfied, he might be frustrated. Instead, he seems adrift.

  A curly-headed blond, David is handsome, his features teetering between pretty youth and rugged leading man. Like the Oscar in the picture over my bed, David looks more worn than his age can account for. Still, he carries himself with a hint of Jean-Paul Belmondo cool, and he’s funny, delighting in the hard-edged absurdism Cubans express through their dichos doggerel.

  Our friendship began with silly wordplay. After I mistook a savory noun for a solemn adjective, mayonais became our running joke, inserted at will into advice, directions, bolero lyrics: “I cannot have your heart, but I still have your mayonais.” When David’s laughter was most free, the cool lifted like a mask to reveal a much younger man, an unfinished boy living on behind the savoirfaire and the premature wrinkles. The boy looked hurt and desperately worried, as if he were peeking into his future and wondering what the hell happened.

  For his interview, we pulled chairs from the dining table into my little room. It was crowded, but we couldn’t sit on the bed, which was covered with my books, notepads, and camera equipment. David often stood and paced in a narrow strip of space between the bed and the wall.

  I started by asking him about his family. He explained that although he is his mother’s only child, his father has a son in the United States. “But we don’t have a relationship. Not with my father or my brother.”

  David was born in 1973, thirteen years after the triumph of the Revolution for which his great-uncle Oscar Lucero Moya died a Hero of Silence. David’s Cuba was defined, at first, by the best economy the Revolution ever knew. The ’70s were glory days for the impact of Russian aid on Cuban domestic life. The dysfunctions of Soviet-style central planning were matched by such blessings as it was in Brezhnev’s power to bestow, and despite the U.S. embargo, Cubans enjoyed more or less the same sense of rationed sufficiency as their East European allies. Still, sufficiency without choices turned out not to be enough for hundreds of thousands of cubanos. They escaped to Florida by twos, tens, and scores until 1980, when Castro unleashed the Mariel boatlift and 125,000 crossed in less than 200 days. Among them was Mari’s ex-husband, David’s father.

  I asked whether that loss still hurt. David shrugged. “No. There was a time when it hurt, but then the separation between us was so great that it was … I don’t know. It hurt a lot the first few years. I didn’t live with him all my life, but the last two years he was in Cuba we got very close. Then he left. He wrote me once, but we never heard from him again.”

  David praised his stepfather, Lionel, as “a magnificent person. We communicate very well. He’s like my father.”

  That had been the vibe when I’d visited his family’s home, where Mari has hung a placard declaring, En es
ta casa se vive y se diesprata con Alegria y Tranquilidad! “In this house, we wake and live with joy and tranquillity!” Though Christmas was a month away, a plastic pine tree contrasted with the walls’ fresh paint and bright pink tiles. Only David’s own room seemed sad, the walls drab beneath a confusion of glam band posters and tentative pencil drawings. He’d shown me his bookshelf, including his most prized volume, a worn paperback copy of José Martí’s La Edad de Oro, “The Age of Gold,” a book of verse for children.

  At dinner at Yolanda’s one night, I’d learned the verb malcrear, which means “to spoil.” The subject, initially, was Yolanda’s dog Beethoven, a mutt much given to tableside begging. As I practiced the word, however, David came back from the kitchen munching an extra biscuit. ¡Malcrear! ¡Como David! Yolanda cried, and everyone laughed. “Like David!” He laughed, too, but not as heartily.

  Our interview continued. David was studying communications at the university: “You can learn how to reach people, how to bring a message to people in the way they want to hear it.”

  By then I had seen David talk his way through a traffic stop, through negotiations for an off-the-books car rental, through a nightclub’s available girls. I told him that I thought he was a good communicator, and taught him the American idiom “good with people.”

  We talked about his job in the government bureau that distributes jobs and salaries, “setting standards so that work is well distributed and people are paid appropriately.” David’s role is modest, a student’s gig, but he enjoys the people part of it. “And I like the interaction with the businesses,” he said, “learning how a business works.” He has entrepeneurial dreams, but he’s not ready to talk about them; Castro’s regime allows very few Cubans to work for themselves.

  David wasn’t always studious and docile. “When I was a kid,” he recalled, his smile half regretful, “I liked being in the street. That’s why I have to study now, because I didn’t study then. I used to skip school, playing street baseball.” He was a typical roquero, a rocker, “one of the young guys who just hang in the street listening to music.” He stopped going to school and got a job. “I just worked and listened to music until I went into the military.”

  Roqueros steep themselves in the music’s presumptive rebellion, fantasizing freedoms they’re not free to act out. Since his roquero days, David has embraced all kinds of music, any genre that can deliver an overdose of sentiment.

  Thinking of his drawings and books, I asked where David acquired his love for all the arts. “When I was younger I studied painting a little, but I got frustrated. I wanted to go to art school and study surrealism and dadaism, but when I presented my paintings, they told me the work wasn’t realistic: that I didn’t paint a portrait, a landscape, nothing technically correct. So I got frustrated and put it aside and never painted again, never picked up a paintbrush again.

  “Now I’ll draw a little, cartoons, but painting? No.” He frowned a that’s-not-fair stubbornness. “Maybe because it was a difficult stage in my life. I was fourteen, you know, and at that age you’re like a sponge. You suffer a lot, and any disappointment is huge for your whole life.”

  At last I asked David to tell me about his attempt to reach Guantánamo.

  He looked a little hurt, as if he’d hoped I’d never put him through this. But he must have known that Maricel had told me about it. This was the most dramatic story of his life. He sighed, said, “Sure,” and began.

  “I started thinking of leaving the country because of economic problems, because of ambition. Every man has ambitions. I dreamed of—I dream of—a better life, of freedom in every sense of the word. Not just freedom of the press and such, but freedom of oneself, of spirit, soul, and body. I wanted to leave, not because I think there’s no freedom in Cuba—there is, but not in every way you need.

  “So my friend and I decided to leave. It was just after the massive emigration in 1994.”

  Three years into the “Special Period in Peacetime,” desperate Cubans began crossing the Straits of Florida in numbers not seen since the Mariel boatlift. Most braved the trip on balsas, rafts made of anything from wood to empty oil barrels. In 1994, nearly forty thousand were intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard and Border Patrol; in accordance with American law, most of these were eventually allowed to become U.S. citizens. No one knows how many thousands of balseros drowned, died of starvation or thirst, or were taken by the straits’ spoiled sharks.

  “I wasn’t in Havana when the balseros left,” David said. “Thank God I didn’t leave that way, because I might not have survived.”

  By the time David and his friend—a young man he liked but didn’t know well—decided on escape, the human flood of 1994 had caused the Clinton administration to weaken decades-old U.S. policy on helping refugees from Communist countries. Late in the year, the Coast Guard instituted a “wet foot, dry foot” policy: Only Cubans who actually made it to U.S. soil (“dry foot”) would be guaranteed a chance at legal immigration. Balseros apprehended at sea (“wet foot”) would be taken to the base at Guantánamo or another safe haven, where some might begin a tortuous process of application for refugee status, political asylum, or immigration.

  Facing this obstacle, balsa traffic slowed, and David and his friend came up with an alternate plan. They decided to swim to Guantánamo.

  The idea wasn’t any crazier than the design of many balsero vessels. In fact, their plan was based on a map and information sent by another friend, an early-’94 balsero who’d been intercepted by the Coast Guard and was still in limbo at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, which Cubans call, simply, el Báse. The rafter now believed that Florida was too far; a short swim to Guantánamo was safer, smarter. That appealed to David and his friend, city boys wary of the open ocean.

  “We traveled to Santiago by train,” David said, “and then by bus to the country around Guantánamo,” accomplishing much of their escape by public transport—one of the beauties of their plan. They were as serious about risking their lives for freedom as any of the hundreds of thousands of balseros before them, but the boys’ methods betrayed an adolescent impatience. “We had shaved our heads bald and our scalps were burned. In the first few days’ travel, we were already hurting.”

  Walking under the flatiron sun, they made their way to the coast and then turned toward el Báse, trying to get as close as possible by land. They drank some water at the first army post they passed, but soon they were deep in the Cuban military zone surrounding Gitmo, encountering one checkpoint or patrol after another, dodging and hiding. Their friend’s map “described exactly where we should go and not go until the last moment.” Finally, there were too many soldiers everywhere. “We couldn’t keep walking, so we launched into the sea.”

  “Launched?” I asked David.

  “Yes,” he said. “We were out there floating on beach balls.”

  Listening, I understood that it had seemed such a good idea back in Havana: swimming with the safety of life preservers in the plausibly deniable form of beach toys. But there’s no easy way to hold onto a beach ball, no way to possess its roundness that doesn’t exhaust your arms. Worse, as I knew from growing up on the ocean, a beach ball inflated enough to keep a person afloat is going to act like a sail.

  “We couldn’t advance because the wind and currents kept pushing us back,” David said, standing up to sway behind his chair. He wasn’t looking at me, or at anything in the room. “Another mistake was that we had thrown away our clothes and shoes. We thought they’d weigh us down, and we thought we’d arrive really soon, without trouble. We had no food or water. There were a lot of big, silvery fish all around us.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “Not at that time,” he said, his attention returning to my questions. “At that time we thought only of swimming, of arriving, when everything would be fine. We figured that if the fish around us disappeared, we’d know there was a bigger animal approaching. Then maybe we might have been frightened. But in those three days at sea,
I don’t remember feeling scared.”

  It took a moment to register. “Three days?” I asked.

  And two nights. Taking turns sleeping, buoying each other up. Waking and paddling, getting nowhere. The weather turning stormy, the wind and currents set against them. Starving and, despite their skins’ saturation, excruciatingly dry. At last, on the third day, they beat their way back to a shore of mangrove swamps.

  “I was scared after we were back on land,” David said. “I realized I was so dehydrated that my sight was getting cloudy. I thought maybe I could die. I was afraid then that if I went back into the ocean that I would die.

  “I was afraid, too, that the Border Guards would catch me, that if we ran we’d get shot at. So I told my friend that I thought we should go back the way we came. Then my friend said we couldn’t go back that way because he had deserted from the military.”

  David could have turned back alone, leaving his friend to face that kind of trouble. But he didn’t. Together, they worked inland through the mangroves and into thickets of thorny brush, tearing their feet and cutting their naked flesh from heel to head.

  They didn’t know just where they were. After all that time in the water, they thought they must be inside the U.S. Naval Base’s boundaries, or very close to its outer edge. But when they broke out into parched, open grassland, they saw that el Báse’s wire and towers were at least another kilometer away. They began to run, moving as fast as they could through the open country. Before they could get much closer, they ran into an armed party of Cuban Border Guards.