Waiting for Snow in Havana

by Carlos Eire

  I’d come a long way from Havana. A very long way.

  I was standing at the Bryn Mawr El station in Chicago, waiting for an A or B train to take me all the way past the Loop, to the Harrison subway stop, where I’d get off and walk the four blocks to my night job at the Conrad Hilton Hotel.

  Long underwear, two sweaters, gloves, ear muffs, wool socks, fleece-lined shoes, and a long, hooded woolen coat weren’t enough to keep me from getting stabbed. My face took the brunt of the assault. My nose was gone. Couldn’t feel the damn thing, though I could taste the snot that dripped from it onto my lips.

  The elevated train platform lurked over Bryn Mawr Avenue and all its lousy shops at second-story level. Most of the platform straddled the street, but the rest of it looked out upon the gritty, rear façades of buildings that stood tightly pressed against each other. I was facing the brown bricks of the Bryn Mawr Theater, which screened second-run films at a price that was just right for refugees.

  ALL SEATS FIFTY CENTS read the permanent sign on the marquee, right under the movable letters that spelled out GOLDFINGER. SEAN CONNERY AS JAMES BOND 007. The Bryn Mawr Theater was a poor substitute for the Miramar Theater, but it was good enough. Especially on those rare days off from work.

  Goldfinger was one of my favorite movies. Right up there with The Vikings. Oddjob’s killer hat was every bit as cool as Kirk Douglas’ flying axes. And Sean Connery was cooler and smarter than Kirk Douglas. He didn’t burn for any single woman. No. He burned for all good-looking women, and he knew how to get them to burn for him, at least for a few hours. Which was all he wanted to see of them, anyway. Detachment, shaken not stirred.

  The elevated train turned into a subway just a little bit south of the Armitage station. The tracks plunged rapidly and deeply into a dark tunnel, and the dank smell and the noise of the steel wheels grinding on the steel tracks in that deep gloom made you feel as if you’d plunged into the Underworld.

  That’s what I felt, anyway, on the way to my dishwashing job at the Conrad Hilton, in January 1966. I counted every lightbulb on the way as I prayed for the perverts to stay away from me, especially at two a.m.

  Two thousand, four hundred and thirteen lightbulbs.

  What a long, long way from Havana I had come. It was a dream to me by then, sunny Miramar, where there wasn’t a single brown brick to be seen and no face-searing wind. It was not one whit different from all the fantasies my brain spun as I slept on a sofabed in the living room of our basement apartment on the North Side of Chicago.

  My brother and I had lived as orphans in the States for more than three and a half years in camps and foster homes, and, most recently, with our uncle Amado in a small town in central Illinois. I was very happy in Amado’s house, happier than I’d been most of my life. But our mother had finally managed to get out of Cuba, after three desperate years of trying, and she’d been sent to live in Chicago by Mr. Sandoval of the Cuban Refugee Center in Miami.

  “Well, let’s see: you don’t speak a word of English, you’re physically handicapped, and you’ve never had to work a day of your life. Your husband is in Cuba and you have two teenage boys you haven’t seen in over three years. I think Chicago is the place for you. Sí, Chicago. There are lots of factories up there. Just about everyone we’ve sent up there has landed a job in a factory. Do you know anyone there?”

  “No, not really…except for the cousin of one of my friends. But I don’t know her very well. Not very well at all. And she’s only been there for a month or so.”

  “That’s great! At least you know her. That’s better than most of the cases we handle. Chicago it is, then!”

  That’s how we ended up in Chicago, thanks to Señor Sandoval’s quick thinking. Excuse me, I think he had become “Mr.” Sandoval, just like any other Cuban refugee.

  My mother still thinks of Sandoval as a nice man.

  Marie Antoinette met us at Union Station early in November 1965. Tony and I had taken the train upstate from Bloomington, carrying all of our belongings in two beat-up suitcases purchased in a hurry at the Salvation Army thrift shop. My luggage had decals on it for Saint Moritz, Monte Carlo, and Rock City, Tennessee. We’d been torn from Amado’s house and all of our good friends with less than a week’s notice. I’d barely had a chance to say good-bye to anyone.

  We rode through the November darkness past a hundred and twenty miles of flat, bare, harvested fields of corn and soybeans. As the train began to roll past the steel mills and oil refineries on the South Side of Chicago, it seemed we had passed through the gates of hell. We saw acres and acres of smokestacks shooting out flames, huge twisting labyrinths of pipes, mazes of twisting stairs, giant spheres, and colossal storage tanks. But it was the flames that made me reel. Big, noisy flames. Balls of flame. Jets. Plumes. Flares. Soft, dancing flames that swayed in the wind and made the chimneys look like giant candles at Satan’s dinner table. Fountains of fire. Satan’s Versailles. We could hear them through the closed windows of our train.

  Whooooosh! Fffrrrrrrrggshhhh! Sssswrrrrooosshhh!

  Marie Antoinette was shocked by our appearance. We’d grown so much. She couldn’t believe that I was taller than my older brother. Later, she would say that the sight of me nearly made her faint.

  She looked about the same, except that her hair, which had been brown when we last saw her, was totally gray.

  We ended up living for two months with the cousin of my mom’s friend, the one she didn’t know all that well. Two whole months, the three of us sleeping on one sofa bed in someone else’s living room. Four adults and two teenagers in a two-bedroom apartment. Two families that didn’t know each other very well. One family with no income at all.

  That’s Cuban refugee hospitality for you.

  Marie Antoinette didn’t know how to look for work. She’d never done it. She did the best she could, under the circumstances, applying only at those places where other Cubans had found jobs.

  No place wanted to hire her.

  So we went to the public aid office to ask for help. But Mr. Fajardo, the Puerto Rican social worker who saw us at the welfare department, wasn’t very helpful.

  Marie Antoinette didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to dress nicely when you applied for welfare. She wore a fine suede coat that a wealthy friend had given her in Mexico, where she had spent the first six months after leaving Cuba, waiting for an American visa. It was a beautiful light green suede coat.

  “You’ve got two grown sons, lady. Both of these guys could find jobs in an instant. Nope, we can’t offer you anything, señora. This country is all about work. Work, work, work. Look at me, I came here with nothing but the shirt on my back. I had nothing when I came here. Nothing at all, and I’ve worked my way up to this job. I didn’t have a nice leather coat like yours.”

  “Yes,” said Marie Antoinette softly, “that’s admirable. But you have to understand, that shirt on your back was probably the only one you owned in Puerto Rico. We had a lot in Cuba, and we lost it all. We lost absolutely everything we owned. And this is a suede coat, not leather, and it was a gift from a friend.”

  That was it. Mr. Fajardo stiffened and he started talking very, very fast.

  “How old are you?” he asked my brother.

  “I’ll be eighteen in two weeks.”

  “Great. Wonderful. You can get a full-time job during the day and go to high school at night. Lakeview High has a night school up on the North Side.”

  “And how old are you?” he asked me.

  “I’ll be fifteen in two weeks.”

  “You guys don’t look like twins. Do you have the same birthday?”

  “Their birthdays are only two days apart,” said Marie Antoinette.

  “Well, your case is a little more complicated,” said Mr. Fajardo to me. “Only fifteen, huh? That means you can’t go to night school. You have to be sixteen to do that. That means you have to go to high school during the day. And you also have to be sixteen in order to work in this state. Huh, that’s a
tough one. Well, here’s what you can do: go to high school during the day and get a full-time job at night. Lie about your age. Tell everyone you’re seventeen. You’re tall. You can fool everyone. Lie about your age and work at night. And as soon as you turn sixteen, drop out of day school, and switch your schedule around.”

  Silence from the three of us.

  “Yeah, you boys can take good care of your crippled mother here. Work, work, work, that’s what this country is all about. I think I can get you a welfare check for one month, while you boys look for work. After that, it’s up to you two to earn the money. I doubt your mom will ever find a job.”

  Lucky thing Tony found a job a month later, in a print shop on Lake Street. A good union job that paid slightly more than minimum wage, with lots of overtime. And he would get to learn a trade, on top of it all.

  He went to night school at Lakeview High, for a year or so. Then he dropped out. Never finished high school.

  But Tony has always been such a good con man, he managed to get into the night program in the business school at Northwestern University three years later. He didn’t finish that either, but at least he got in. Without a high school diploma.

  I had a harder time finding a job. Not easy when you’re in school all day, in a strange city, and you don’t have a clue as to how to look for work. Even harder when you’re lousy at lying.

  Tony couldn’t help me: he was always too busy working overtime, or resting. Our mother tried to earn some spare change by doing a bit of sewing, but the two customers she found through the Cuban network would pay her with yards of old fabric rather than cash.

  Lucky thing we ran into another Cuban, Señor Mancilla, at the Woolworth’s on Bryn Mawr Avenue around Christmas, as we were picking out a Nativity set. We had to have one. Had to, even if it was from the “Tén-cén,” or ten-cent store. Mancilla recognized us as Cubans by our accents, came over, introduced himself, and within two minutes, solved my unemployment problem.

  “Hey, I can get you a job tomorrow. A good job. Washing dishes.”

  Señor Mancilla had once been a small-scale Sugar Boy in one of the eastern provinces of Cuba, where his father owned a sugar plantation and a mill. Now he ran one of the freight elevators at the Hilton Hotel on the night shift. And he knew all the Puerto Ricans who ran the dishwashing department.

  That’s how I ended up at the Conrad Hilton Hotel, working as a dishwasher. I told them I was eighteen.

  But, Jesus H. Wonder-working Christ, what was this cough I had?

  I couldn’t stop coughing. Neither could my brother. Cough, cough, cough. That’s all we did, all day, all night, since shortly after Christmas. Coughing so intense, so deep, it nearly turned you inside out. Sludge denser than rubber in our throats and lungs. This wasn’t any garden-variety green phlegm, the kind we’d seen on the sidewalks and curbs of Havana, but a vicious, lung-clogging gunk that could seal shut your windpipe and leave you gasping for air.

  A couple of times Tony and I came close to death, or so we thought. Tony actually turned blue one time, right there under the ceiling pipes. I smacked him on the back as hard as I could, harder than I’d ever hit him, harder than I’d ever wanted to hit him. Our mother was screaming at the top of her lungs, “Do something, Carlos, please, do something, he’s choking to death! Ay, Dios mío!”

  I pummeled him mercilessly and mercifully at the same time, in a panic. I knew just what he felt like, gasping for air. I’d been there myself, a couple of times already. Once, on the way to the elevated station, all alone on a quiet side street, and once at the Conrad Hilton, in the employee’s restroom on the fourteenth floor. Both of these times, I nearly passed out from lack of oxygen, but somehow managed to expel what was clogging my windpipe by pounding on my chest as hard as I could.

  I hammered Tony’s back with my fists as if I were a prizefighter.

  At last Tony coughed. Out came the industrial-strength phlegm, and in went the life-giving air. His face gradually turned from blue back to a sort of normal color. Then Marie Antoinette made a panicky phone call to a man who lived down the street, the only Cuban we knew who owned a car. She asked him to drive us to Edgewater Hospital, about seven blocks away.

  Señor Pujol told my mom that he couldn’t do it. “Too risky,” he said. “If your son dies in my car while I’m driving him to the hospital, then you could sue me. That’s what people do in this country. No, sorry, lo siento mucho, but I can’t risk having your son die in my car and then having you sue me afterwards. Sorry. Call someone else.”

  And no one thought to call for an ambulance or a cab. Too expensive. So we didn’t go to the hospital. Marie Antoinette thought it was way too cold to wait for a bus out on the street.

  But it didn’t occur to her that Tony waited for the El train and two buses each and every day, and that he’d be doing it the next morning, when it was even colder. He didn’t miss a single day of work. He couldn’t. Without his paycheck, we were sunk. I was earning $1.25 per hour. My take-home pay for a forty-hour work week, after taxes, was a whopping $35. My brother earned twice as much, or more with overtime. So we couldn’t take time off, even though the coughing wouldn’t stop. Never.

  Both of us had whooping cough, but we didn’t know it.

  Whenever our schedules gave us a chance, we would go to a man known as Dr. Piedra, who always seemed to be playing poker with his friends in the backroom of his office. He did nothing except give us some shots and say, “You’ll be fine, it’s just a bad cold.”

  I still don’t know what he injected into us. We asked, and he said “medicina.” If we’d been back in Cuba, our mother would have pierced through his lame smokescreen in an instant. But she seemed to have lost her bearings so completely, she let this go. Just as she had let everything else go.

  We’d cough all the way to Dr. Piedra’s office, and all the way home, in the subzero cold. We’d cough all day and all night, and our coworkers would say, “Hey, kid, you need to see a doctor.” Both of us would say the same thing, “I just went to the doctor, and he gave me a shot and said I’d be fine.” Some of the wiser ones among our coworkers would say, “You should find a different doctor.” But poker-playing Dr. Piedra was the only doctor we knew, through our limited network of fellow refugee Cubans. God forbid we should dream of consulting an English-speaking physician. Marie Antoinette still harbored illusions about taking care of us, and she insisted that we see a doctor she could talk to. Tony and I just went with the flow.

  One lady at the Hilton gave me the name of her doctor, but his office was in the wrong part of town. Somewhere on the Northwest Side of Chicago, where the Polish people lived. I didn’t have time to ride the bus all the way out there after school and then make it to work on time. And it would have taken almost all of one of our precious days off to get there and back.

  I finally got the correct diagnosis much too late, when the coughing had nearly stopped. It came from the guy who sat behind me in homeroom that freshman year of high school, who returned to school one day after being gone for nearly a month and diagnosed me on the spot.

  “You worthless piece of scum, you know what you gave me? Whooping cough. I thought I was going to die. All that coughing of yours made me catch it. You gave it to me. And now I’ve missed a whole month of school. Damn spic.”

  I didn’t miss a single day of school. And I didn’t miss a single day of work either.

  My schedule was so simple, so predictable. Every day from Wednesday through Sunday I would work at the Hilton from four in the afternoon until two in the morning. Monday and Tuesday were days off. Every day from Monday through Friday I’d go to school, from eight in the morning until three-fifteen in the afternoon. A mad dash to the elevated station, six blocks from my high school, would get me to the train just on time. And the train always got me to work on time. Always. Chicago elevated trains stopped for nothing or no one. Not even four feet of snow.

  I had no time for homework, except for Mondays, Tuesdays, and one period of stud
y hall every day. Tests or assignments due on any day of the week after Tuesday were a challenge, but manageable.

  Fortunately, a guidance counselor at Nicholas Senn High School had assigned me to very easy classes for all the wrong reasons.

  “Oh, you did well on these placement tests. What a surprise! Amazing, for a Latin!”

  “How well did I do?”

  “Uh…uh…you got perfect scores on all the tests. Amazing! So unusual, for anybody. And your grades at that other school downstate were pretty good, too.”

  “Yeah, straight A’s aren’t too bad,” I boasted.

  “Well…I think you should go into regular classes. Honors classes would be too much for you. After all, English is not your native language.”

  “I know English better than Spanish by now. I’ve forgotten a lot of Spanish.”

  “Well, still, I think the best thing would be for you to take regular courses, just like all the other Latin kids.”

  End of story. I wasn’t about to argue with an adult, even though he seemed awfully dense.

  The classes I attended that freshman year were full of troubled kids and led by teachers who should have been doing something else with their lives. I spent more time trying to survive than learning.

  One guy in art class became my worst enemy within a week. He wore a leather jacket and steel-toed boots, and reeked of cigarette smoke. He punched me in class, tore up my homework, tried to extort money from me, and challenged me to fights daily. I think I must have been the weirdest kid he’d ever met.

  “Sorry,” I’d say. “I can’t fight you. I’m a Christian, and I’m supposed to turn the other cheek. You can insult me all you want, and tear up my homework every day, as you did today, but I’m supposed to forgive you, love you, and pray for you.”

  It was just weird enough to work. You should have seen the look in his eyes every time I said this. After a while he stopped bothering me.