Yankee Come Home

by William Craig

  So there wasn’t much talk as the old man drove us west back over the sierra, past cooperative cattle farms, and through one-street ridgeline villages. I rolled down my window and took deep breaths.

  Orestes and Ildefonse had still been at the house; the young man had promised to tell them that I was fine, that I wanted them to go home whenever the going looked good. But as the old man let me out on Santiago’s cathedral square in the losing end of twilight, I supposed that I finally understood something of the fear my Cuban friends felt at everyday checkpoints and traffic stops. And despite having failed to get even a long-distance glimpse of el Báse, perhaps I’d been granted a fractional insight to the feelings of men seized by powers contemptuous of justice. At Guantánamo, freedom’s in trouble on both sides of the wire.

  Chapter 14

  MOVING IN IMPERIAL CIRCLES

  Chickie danced like a man with a mission. Everybody out on the floor in the Café des Artex’s atrium was having a good time, and there were some fine dancers among them. The band was Las Perlas del Son, seven santiagueras in opalescent dresses, four working the beat and three up front singing and shimmying.

  Still, Chickie was the man to watch. In fact, it was hard to take my eyes off him. He was a little guy, maybe eye level with the pointy tips of the bust on his partner’s old-school cocktail dress. His slightly outsize head looked even bigger for being perfectly bald, giving him the overall head-to-body proportion of a comic book Evil Genius. His moves were strenuous but smooth, flinging his partner out and back like a funk centrifuge. She was laughing so hard, having so much fun she almost forgot to brake into his snappy passes and twirls, but Chickie was always right there to catch her, dancer enough for both of them. He’d do something daring, she’d shriek; he’d cock his head and leap in again, bouncing off the beat like it was a trampoline. Everybody else out there was dancing to dance, dancing to make love, but Chickie …

  I came to hear Las Perlas. A couple of days back, walking down Enramadas toward the city archive, I passed an open archway with a little desk just inside. A young woman was reading at the desk, a beat-up bass leaning against the staircase behind her. El contrabajo belonged to the lady, Rosita Lopez, contrabajista and directora of Las Perlas del Son. (The name means both “Pearls of Sound” and “Pearls of Son,” the roots music of Oriente.) Her all-woman grupo had traveled to Australia and Canada, back before the millennium, but things were slower now. She worked at this government office, where a musician friend had just returned her bass.

  All members of the violin family make sound the same way. A plucked note sends vibrations shivering down through the delicate wooden bridge that supports the strings. The bridge stands on the instrument’s pretty top, between the carved f holes; vibrations transmitted through the bridge move the top, or “table,” up and down. Inside the fiddle, a wooden dowel called the sound post is braced between the table and the broad back. The post transmits the table’s oscillations to the back; the whole sound box shivers, beating the plucked string’s vibratory frequency into the air, making sound waves throb and sigh.

  Rosita’s bass made more of a thud. All that transmitting of vibrations requires wood touching wood, but along the meters of glued connections among table, sides, and back there was almost as much open seam as closed. The sound post was out of position, the bridge a whittled chunk of what looked like packing-crate slat. By Santiago son-playing standards, it was rough. By U.S. jazz musician standards, it was impossible. I found out where Las Perlas would be playing next, and I’d come to the Café des Artex with a parcel of strings, bridges, and spare parts donated by Kolstein music and Lemur music, the top U.S. bass shops, to the contrabajistas of Santiago.

  I knew she’d find uses for all that, but just now she was demonstrating that las contrabajistas de Santiago de Cuba never let a little thing like impossibility stop the groove. Rosita was a small woman with small hands; she muscled those too-high strings down to the fingerboard as easily as if she were pressing piano keys. She faced the bass into the brick-and-stucco corner like a bad boy, making the walls act as an extension of the sound box, doubling her volume. Her tumbao boomed, driving Las Perlas and the packed dance floor.

  Driving Chickie, who circled his partner like a strutting pigeon, limboing down to the ground and jumping up like the earth just shoved. He was magnificent, ridiculous. I felt like I was watching an award-winning train wreck. Chickie was so …

  “‘Damaged.’ Or ‘wounded,’ that’s the right word, yes?”

  Tomas’s English was a whole lot better than my German, though he pronounced “wounded” with a “wow.” But I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.

  “Chickie was wounded?”

  “In the war. The Angola War.” Tomas was Chickie’s friend and the lover of Chickie’s dance partner, Irina. He lived in Stuttgart and tried to spend at least a month of every year in Santiago. Tall and long-nosed, gray at the temples, he looked like a run-down Dürer knight with folds like dueling scars in his broad cheeks. He may be a decade older than I, or it may just be the rum.

  “They blew him up.”

  The Angola War. “Cuba’s Vietnam” is the cliché.

  The overt war began when Fidel Castro sent troops to support the former Portuguese colony’s first independent government against rebels backed by the United States and South Africa’s apartheid regime. But Cuba’s Angolan venture predated its large-scale troop commitment.

  In the mid-1960s and early ’70s, Cuban advisers helped the socialist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) make war on the Portuguese from exile in Zaire. When the MPLA formed the new nation’s first government in 1975, the United States gave financial and military support to another mildly socialist anticolonial army, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), fronted by Jonas Savimbi. Savimbi rebranded UNITA as the MPLA’s “anti-Communist” opposition and cooperated with a U.S.-backed South African invasion of Angola. Castro responded by sending more than thirty thousand troops to check the South Africans.

  Angola’s civil conflict became one of the Cold War’s most protracted and complex proxy battles. Between 1975 and 1988, some 350,000 Cuban soldiers served in Africa, as did fifty thousand Cuban doctors, teachers, and other nation-building volunteers. Well armed by the Soviet Union, Cuba’s army beat back the initial South African / UNITA offensive and supported the MPLA government in a long counterinsurgency. The proxy war ended in a dramatic 1988 showdown when Cuban troops met and stalemated a full-scale South African invasion. The climactic, months-long Battle of Cuito-Cuanavale was the greatest battle on the continent since World War II, involving artillery, armored vehicles, and jet fighters. Cuba’s narrow and costly victory forced all sides to peace talks that eventually resulted in the complete withdrawal of Cuban and South African troops.

  Though U.S. conservatives—conspicuously including anti-Castro Cubans—still supported Savimbi, UNITA degenerated into a warlord faction notable for its use of “blood diamonds,” child soldiers and kidnapped sex slaves; it collapsed with his death in 2002.

  And though Nelson Mandela personally thanked Fidel Castro and the Cuban people for their intervention in Angola, which helped topple South Africa’s apartheid government, Cuba’s African adventure wasn’t a triumph for ideological purists. Between 1975 and 1988, there were always thirty thousand to fifty thousand Cuban soldiers in Angola; over time, many Angolans came to resent “Cuban colonialism” as a reprise of Portuguese rule. Cuba made numerous arrogant, shortsighted interventions in Angola’s economic and social life, including a notorious policy of replacing all native sugarcane with a supposedly superior Cuban variety—which promptly died off, taking Angola’s sugarcane industry with it. The Angola War was always complicated by wars in neighboring countries, particularly Congo and Namibia, and by ethnic conflicts that transcended borders. As in all wars that erase distinctions between combatants and civilians, all sides were guilty of brutally simple solutions to complex problems, such as the “fr
ee fire” zones established by Cuban arms, which cleared civilians from contested border areas.

  And Cuba was not spared the ugly ironies common to prolonged client-state wars. When the MPLA government began to run short of cash, Cuban soldiers were used to protect Chevron oil rigs from attack by UNITA saboteurs. The oil revenue was used to pay the Cuban government a per-soldier fee in support of the expeditionary force. Though profitable for Cuba, this arrangement made Angola—and therefore Cuba—all the more dependent on capitalist, neocolonial powers.

  Cuba’s experience in Angola differs from the United States’ Vietnam debacle in many ways, not least among them Cuba’s reasonable claim to victory. Then there’s the difference between Lyndon Baines Johnson’s motivation for escalating the Vietnam War and Castro’s for going into Angola. Johnson’s impetus was not ardent anticommunism, but fear of the political cost of “losing” Vietnam. While Soviet aid was plentiful and his people firmly under control, Fidel could hardly have feared political repercussions from the “fall” of Angola. His enthusiasm for the war was always greater than that of his Soviet sponsors, who often tried to rein him in. Castro was clearly excited by the anticolonial and antiapartheid aspects of the struggle, and seems to have committed Cuba to those causes, but the years of Angola’s oil-derived payments to Cuba muddle the mission. Was Cuba’s ultimate purpose in Angola revolutionary or self-serving?

  Like the Vietnam War, Cuba’s war in Angola was intended to be much less than a maximum effort. Only a tiny percentage of the population would serve. Leaders in Cuba and the United States hoped that the home front would hardly notice that the nation was at war. But both conflicts dragged on for years, involving too many citizens. Even optional, overseas wars can’t be quarantined; one way or another, they change the nations that fight them.

  Draft regulations and the advantages of social class protected many Americans from direct involvement in Vietnam. Still, by 1973, when most U.S. troops left Vietnam, almost three million servicemen and servicewomen had done time in Southeast Asia—about one in seventy Americans. More than fifty thousand had died there, nearly one in four thousand citizens. The terrible social impact of the war has been blamed on the news media, on White House lies, on a self-indulgent baby boom generation … but it’s undeniably true that an experience shared by so many Americans could not fail to change the nation. The war’s ideology, heroes, scandals, iconic imagery, slang, and drug culture radically revised America’s self-image.

  Percentagewise, the Angola War was even more certain to disturb its home front. Those 350,000 soldiers and fifty thousand civilian volunteers represented 4.5 percent of a population of fewer than nine million Cubans—about one in every twenty-two cubanos. Nearly one in thirty-nine hundred died. If Vietnam was a dramatic social crisis for the United States, Angola was Cuba’s quiet catastrophe.

  Comparatively quiet. Just as many Americans believed that the U.S.A. had a duty to fight communism anywhere in the world, so many Cubans felt their country had a moral mission to fight imperialism and oppression. Helping Angolans stand up to apartheid South Africa and Uncle Sam wasn’t a hard sell. And though some cubanos undoubtedly disagreed with the war, especially as it dragged on, the regime had no tolerance for antiwar protests.

  Yet the war came home in many forms. The prolonged occupation of another country inevitably seeds cynicism and corruption. Though victorious in key battles, Cuba’s soldiers spent most of their thirteen years in Angola fighting a counterinsurgency, a role that alternated between stultifying guard duty—perhaps at a Chevron oil rig—and search-and-destroy or area-denial operations such as burning every village along the border with Namibia. It’s not surprising that many cubanos perceive a disaffection in sons and daughters, friends and neighbors who served in Angola. Some suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder; some will just never again see the world as others do.

  Angola vets brought the war home in their hearts, minds, and, inevitably, in their bodies. Not just in scars and disabilities, but also in their blood. The return of Angola veterans started a pan-Caribbean epidemic of dengue fever. The vets also brought back Cuba’s first recorded HIV infections.

  Both the U.S. war in Vietnam and Cuba’s intervention in Angola cost far more than their societies could afford. The underfunded, voraciously expensive Vietnam War raised deficits and inflation, setting the United States up for the ruinous cost shock of early ’70s oil crises. And though the Soviet Union spent billions on aid to Angola’s war effort, and Angola paid for Cuba’s protection, the years from 1973 to 1988 were the years Cuba most needed to be investing in a self-sustaining economy. The collapse of the Soviet Union over the next three years triggered a 34 percent drop in Cuba’s gross domestic product.

  The United States and Cuba had some altruistic motives for their crusades in Vietnam and Angola, but imperial behavior engenders imperial attitudes. Imperialism often prevents nations from focusing on domestic problems, from social inequality to economic weakness. While the United States was attempting to win an unwinnable war in Vietnam, it was failing to remedy its increasing dependence on foreign oil. While Cuba was rescuing Angola, it was failing to remedy its abject dependence on foreign aid. These failings have been the central facts of each nation’s political dysfunction, security woes, and economic instability ever since.

  Like Vietnam vets, then, veterans of the Angola War came home to a lot less than they had a right to expect. They’d been told they were fighting for their economic and political systems, for their way of life and its ideals. But war’s end was followed by severe cutbacks and shortages, by unemployment and crowding, inflation, and a terrible, pervasive disillusionment.

  * * *

  “They blew him up,” Tomas told me.

  His friend Chickie was smashed up over there, in Angola. Tomas couldn’t really tell me the story, because Chickie had never told it to him. Chickie can’t talk. Whatever happened left him mute.

  “I’ve never asked him to write it down,” Tomas said.

  Chickie must do a fair amount of writing. Not so many people can interpret sign language, though Tomas, who obviously loves his friend, has learned some. Chickie, however, taught hearing-and speech-impaired students, and presumably spent a lot of time in front of blackboards and typewriters or computers. But the story of what happened to him in Angola is one he’d never cared to share.

  Las Perlas took a break. Chickie and Irina came to the table, and Tomas handled introductions all around.

  Irina was delightful, full of happy energy, obviously in love with Tomas. She was a woman in her late thirties, tall and somewhat gawky, a bit horse-faced. Her smile was joyous and bright white, except for her right front tooth, which was the same rum brown as her hair.

  Chickie was, as expected, intense, shaking hands like an arm wrestler checking out the opposition. He stared into my eyes for a second, then ended our wordless conversation with an adamant nod.

  Tomas bought a round, and I bought the next. There was a shortage of chairs, so Irina sat on Tomas’s lap. Chickie drank as he danced, fearlessly, unrelentingly. God knew how much he’d already knocked down, but I thought his eyes glazed just a bit with our second round. Then Las Perlas started up again, and Chickie and Irina left us for the floor.

  I learned a little more about Tomas, his accountancy practice back home, how he came to Santiago as a much younger man, fell in love with the city, kept coming back, fell in love with the people and then, years ago, with Irina.

  He said he’d be happy to marry Irina, not because their love needed marriage—“We’re not a couple of kids, yes?”—but to get her out of the country, where he could take care of her. They weren’t really free to carry on their romance here; there was no privacy in the home she shared with an extensive family, and she couldn’t join him in hotels or straitlaced casas particulares. The iffy casas, the ones that accommodate prostitutes? Well, they’d take true lovers, but sneaking around that way was illegal, expensive, and tense.

  Private homes o
ffer no refuge. Once, Tomas tried taking Irina to a house in a much smaller town, where he and the landlord made the mistake of thinking it would be okay to leave the car not quite hidden in the house’s side alley. Twenty minutes into their lovemaking, the cops were at the door, wondering what the car with the brown tourist-rental plates was doing there. They lied fast, and piled on still more lies in front of senior officers at the police station the next day, trying to explain that no money changed hands, that this was just a case of friends letting friends stay over.

  Nor is it easy to marry your way off the island. The Cuban government hassles its citizens about leaving, and other nations are so wary of marriages of convenience that they often give true love a viciously hard time. Tomas had tried the shortcut method, inviting Irina to visit him in Germany—where they’d marry, so she could stay—but German officials in Cuba worked so hard to discourage her that she gave up on the visa. “There’s no reason, no law against it. Theoretically they have to let you visit, but practically …”

  They could marry in Cuba, but that’s no guarantee of permission to leave the country. Even if successful, the exit process can easily take two years or more.

  Tomas told me the story of a guy he knew who’d married a Cuban girl, two years and counting. When the government considered her application to leave, it was rejected because of their age difference. “He is, yes, more than twenty years older, but their love is close!” But the Cubans disapproved of what they saw as a marriage of convenience.