Waiting for Snow in Havana

by Carlos Eire

  I have no idea how long he was there. All I know is that we didn’t have to bring him food anymore. I don’t think there was any kind of trial or a hearing or anything like that. There were far too many suspects in the same fix, and those in power saw no need to try them anyway. They were guilty of being suspect, one of the worst crimes of all.

  Some never came home from that prison, or from the others to which they were dispersed. Uncle Filo was one of the lucky ones. He actually came home several months later. The bad news was that he’d lost his mind in prison.

  My father wouldn’t give us the details even though Tony and I begged for them. We wanted to know what it was like to be totally insane—completamente loco. It sounded so interesting to have a crazy uncle. But Louis XVI wouldn’t budge.

  “You don’t want to know, believe me.”

  One day, however, my father slipped and mentioned that the electric shock treatments weren’t really doing much for his brother. He went on to describe the shock treatments in some detail. It sounded a lot like the electric chair to me.

  Eventually, the shock treatments did something. Or maybe it was just the passage of time. Filo gradually regained some measure of sanity. But although he began to interact with others, he couldn’t talk about what he had lived through for a very long time. Eventually, he told a few stories, but my parents kept most of them to themselves. They only spoke about the firing squad trick played on Filo day after day.

  “Hey, Nieto, when you hear firing outside, that’ll be your son we’re shooting today.”

  I remember visiting him at his house about ten months after his arrest, just before I left Cuba for good. He spoke in a whisper, warning us that there were listening devices everywhere. He also constantly checked the window shutters to make sure they were closed.

  “They’re always listening, you know. Always. And they’re everywhere. Where you least expect them, when you least expect them, there they are. Always. Siempre. Siempre. Siempre.”

  Most of the time he just sat there like some kind of living mummy, with a strange look in his eyes. There’s really so little to talk about when you think someone is always listening to you. Especially when those who are listening might throw you back in prison for saying the wrong thing.

  How beautiful, those Committees for the Defense of the Revolution! How utterly beautiful an instrument of fear and intimidation. Because we had one right next door to our house, we always had to watch what we said inside our own house. The walls had ears. Voices carried.

  Too bad we didn’t have greeting cards for the CDRs, as they came to be known. If only someone had thought of it, or if there had been enough paper and ink to produce them. You’d need a lot of these cards in Havana alone, given the fact that every single block had a CDR—and still does, even as I write this.

  Imagine writing the text for such cards.

  Comrades, thanks! So glad you insisted on my presence at the latest rally. It really bolstered my Revolutionary spirit and gave me a sense of purpose in life. I will remain forever grateful. Keep it up, please! Not one step back, not even to gain momentum!

  Silly me! Sorry I forgot to volunteer to cut sugarcane.

  So sorry. Thanks for reminding me. Love the work you’re doing, comrades. I also love hacking cane with a machete. Long live the Revolution.

  Thanks a million, comrades, for reminding me that you control the ration cards I need for my survival. I am so, so sorry for whatever it is that you think I’ve been doing wrong lately. If you have the chance, please point out to me what that might be, so I can stop doing it. Or not doing it. Whatever. Venceremos!

  With the deepest, heartfelt gratitude I wish to thank you for denouncing my loved one to the authorities and seeing to it that the worm was sent to prison. It is my fondest hope that this scumbag will be rehabilitated sometime. Should this worm ever return home, I promise to keep an eye out for anti-Revolutionary thinking and tell you about it.

  Ever yours. Ever forwards, never backwards.

  Worms. I should explain. That was the new name for counter-Revolutionaries. Fidel called the invaders and all who supported them gusanos. Worms. Maggots. The lowest of the low. Crawling vermin. Vile insects seeking to destroy the Revolution.

  And Fidel made all of the captured invaders wear yellow T-shirts, so they would look wormlike. How he was able to come up with thousands of yellow T-shirts for the prisoners when all clothing was in short supply was one of those miracles made possible by the Revolutionary will to power. Then the men in the yellow T-shirts were interrogated on live television for days on end. Since all television sets back then were black-and-white, and newspapers and magazines didn’t carry color photographs, and very few Cubans got to see the prisoners in person, the yellow T-shirts were also a fitting symbol of the genius of Revolutionary thinking.

  Somehow, though, we found out that the T-shirts were yellow. And, like the ancient insult “Christian,” the name “Worm” was proudly taken up by those of us who had wanted the invaders to triumph.

  But those men didn’t inspire much pride. There they were, being interrogated on television, one by one. Fidel made sure that those who were the sons of the “finest” families were given the greatest exposure. Worms. Crawling vermin, returning to reclaim their property and privilege, returning to enslave all other Cubans once again. Fidel wanted everyone to think that all of the invaders were the sons of the rich and powerful.

  One of them was the son of one of my father’s closest friends. He was a funny guy, about ten years older than most of us kids. He had one of the nicest rooms I had ever seen. It was full of model airplanes hanging from the ceiling. I liked visiting his house, just so I could see the room. And it was a dangerous house, so that’s saying a lot. His patio had more lizards than I had ever seen in any one place. They were everywhere, crawling, darting, jumping, basking in the sun. My dad would sit out there with his friend and talk, ignoring their presence. I couldn’t. I tried to spend as much time as possible away from that patio.

  And there was something else scary about that house. The guy with the airplanes hanging from the ceiling was a hypnotist, and he loved to terrorize us.

  “Watch out, kids, here I come. All I have to do is look at you and you shall turn into my slaves. Here I go…Ommmmmm…you are under my command…you shall do as I say.”

  We believed him, of course, and we ran away from him, and he chased us. One day, at the beach, we spent an entire afternoon running away from him and avoiding his gaze.

  Now, there he was, on television, looking totally submissive, his eyes lowered in shame and disgust. He wasn’t hypnotizing anyone. No. Just the opposite: he looked as if he had been hypnotized. Or brainwashed. In reply to the question “What did the Americans do for you?” he was saying the same thing as all the other men.

  “Nos embarcaron.” They shipped us off. They left us hanging. They screwed us.

  This was hard to believe. Inconceivable. The hypnotist and all the other yellow-shirted Worms, each and every one of them, said on television that the Americans, who had planned and funded the Invasion, had dumped them at the Bay of Pigs and left them stranded without any of the support they’d been promised. None of us watching our televisions believed them. They must have been drugged, or brainwashed, or hypnotized.

  Americans didn’t break promises or screw freedom fighters. No way. These men were all lying. They were lying so they could be treated well in prison, or released maybe.

  Desengaño. Hard to take.

  Years later, the truth would emerge. They did get screwed, after all. Those damn Kennedy brothers, John and Bobby, pulled the plug on the Invasion when it was much too late to do so. Pulled the plug and left the men there to be mowed down, as the dogwoods and azaleas bloomed in Washington. They were only Cubans, after all.

  Fast-forward, two years or so.

  The Orange Bowl is packed. People are lined up outside, unable to get in, but we have great seats behind one of the goalposts. We live only five blocks
away and have hung around the small baseball stadium outside the Bowl countless times, waiting for home run balls to sail over the fence and into our hands. But we’ve never been inside the Bowl. What a thrill.

  We’re there to see President Kennedy welcome the returning heroes of the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Imagine that! We’ll get to see all the Worms and the president of the United States, in person. This is history in the making, and we’re there. We’ll be able to tell our kids and their kids all about this day. We’re so lucky to live only five blocks away, in that orphanage.

  The Worms have been exchanged for fifty-three million dollars worth of medicine and food. A fair trade. Fidel suddenly has a thousand fewer mouths to feed and he gets good American stuff in return for looking benevolent. Good riddance. Jack Kennedy gets to play the hero, rescuing the freedom fighters he screwed.

  Jackie Kennedy is there, too. The Queen of America gives a speech in nearly flawless Spanish. She and her husband speak of the great sacrifice made by these men, and they promise that the flag of their Brigade 2506 will soon wave over a free Cuba.

  I am still dumb enough to believe them, and I cheer and clap along with all the other Cubans at the Orange Bowl.

  We return to our orphanage filled with hope. Cod for dinner that afternoon. The house stinks. And it’s my turn to wash the dishes that day. I’m so hungry I try to eat the fish, even though it smells and tastes like putrid demon testicles from hell. But I can’t; I just can’t. I run to the bathroom, gagging, and I puke. Tony is brave enough to eat three or four mouthfuls. I come back to the table, scrape the cod off the rice, and eat what remains below the top layer, unpolluted by the fish. The other boys stare at me as if I’m insane. When everyone’s done, I go into the kitchen to wash the dishes. The codfish pot has a thick crust on the bottom, which I have to scrape off.

  Later that evening, around sunset, Tony and I make our way to the public library on Seventh Avenue. God bless my brother, he has found a place where we can read in air-conditioned comfort, away from the thugs at our orphanage. We go there several nights a week and stay until closing. I scour the history section. So few books left to read. I’ve read almost all of them. What will I do when there are no more history books left to read in this library?

  The librarian announces that the library is about to close. We each check out a couple of books and head back to the orphanage. On the way back we catch sight of a dead possum, flattened and rotting on the curb-side. We’ve never seen anything like it. I say it’s a giant rat.

  “Look at the tail, Tony. Only rats have tails like that.”

  “Don’t be stupid. Rats never get that big. It’s some kind of porcupine.”

  “You’re wrong. Porcupines have quills, not fur. It’s a rat.”

  “What do you know about rats, anyway? I say it’s a porcupine.”

  “And, hey, what are all those worms crawling all over it? They look like moving grains of rice. Look at them.”

  “Disgusting. Yecchh. I’ve never seen so many worms eating a dead animal. I think they’re maggots.”

  “Heeew, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to eat rice again. And it’s about all I can eat at that house. What will I do if I can’t eat the rice? Eat nothing but toast and guava paste?”

  “Don’t think about it. Let’s go. Let’s see if we can find some empty soda bottles.”

  We scour the sidewalks, curbs, lawns, and empty lots for bottles we can cash in. Each is worth two cents. It’s a good night tonight. We find enough bottles to trade for two ice-cream sandwiches. We talk as we walk and eat.

  “Hey, we got to see President Kennedy today, and all the Worms too.”

  “Yeah, that was great. But do you think he’s right? Will Fidel be defeated soon?”

  “You bet. We’ll be going home any day now. Any day. Soon. Very soon, you’ll see.”

  “I hope you’re right. I can’t wait to go home.”

  Flash forward thirty-seven years to the present day.

  As my loved ones slumber all around me in air-conditioned comfort in our house in the woods, I imagine what might have been. What if the Invasion had gone as planned? What if Fidel’s airplanes had been bombed to smithereens that April morning? I picture the uprising. I see thousands of ordinary Cubans reaching for the weapons Fernando and his friends had stashed away, fighting the militiamen, house to house. I visualize the United States Air Force joining in the fight, defending the men on the beaches.

  I close one eye and see nuclear warfare between America and Russia. No good. Wait. I close the other eye and see the Worms victorious. That’s much better. I see Fidel vanquished, lined up against a wall and shot with blanks for days on end before finally being sent to live for the rest of his life in Trenton, New Jersey, sentenced to a lifetime job as janitor at the train station, his mouth permanently gagged, a paperback copy of Kant’s Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft in one pocket and one of Kritik der Reinen Vernunft in the other. I see Fidel being forced to read these two books at night, constantly, as he lies on a hard table wired for electric shock treatments. If he dozes off, or takes his eyes off the text, or fails to turn the pages in a timely fashion, or fails to answer correctly when quizzed on his reading of Kant by volunteers from the Princeton philosophy faculty, I see him being shocked. I see myself staying at home in Havana, with no Revolution left to chase me away, free to apply Brylcreem to my hair and dance the night away at a thousand and one nightclubs.

  I see myself leading a better, sweeter life than the one God has graced me with.

  Forget about it. Nothing is that simple. Not even when you’re a hypnotized Worm.

  I loved my walks to the library with Tony, and our search for bottles, and that dead maggoty possum as much as I loved the bombs that fell from the sky and nearly killed us.

  I swear it. May I be cleft in two by a wicked lightning bolt if I’m not telling the truth—preferably one that zigzags in nice, straight angles, and is thick and sulphur yellow.

  Lo juro. Mal rayo me parta.

  30

  Treinta

  Another day in Limbo. No school. No place in particular to go. No plans for the day, except to play, soak up the sunshine, deny the present, and wait for the exit permit.

  Shafts of light streamed through the shutters, as always, knifing through the swirling galaxies of dust. On this day, there was also a mosquito net in view when I opened my eyes. The shafts of light poured through the net as if it weren’t there at all, filling the space around me, defining it. Each and every thread in the net was aglow.

  Sweet world, I thought. Safe sweet world, in the light. It felt as if I were inside a cloud, floating above the earth, far removed from all trouble. No mosquitoes trapped in the net this morning.

  I was waking up in my parents’ bed that morning, not my own. I’d had the terrors in the middle of the night and had asked to sleep there. I’d been doing that a lot lately. Louis XVI was a very large man, and there really wasn’t enough room in the bed for three of us, so he got up patiently, as always, and shuffled off to my bed in his baggy boxer shorts. I was ashamed of my night terrors but couldn’t do much about them.

  I was fine during the day. The sunlight was grace itself, and I could ignore everything that troubled me.

  But nighttime was different. At night, it was hard to keep evil at bay. That choking darkness, full of lizards you couldn’t see. The shadows you didn’t want to see. The fears. The awful dreams. Not about Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, or my fifth-grade love. These were dreams that allowed the hidden lizards to escape. Like the one about the voodoo witch.

  It was that dream that started the terrors. In it I was chased by a large African woman who looked a lot like the legless lady who had begged outside of church for so many years. She chased me in the same way that Torso Lady and Candlestick Lady had done when I was younger, but she was much worse. For one thing, she had legs and could use them. Worse than that, she was evil incarnate, seeking me out, longing to capture me and annihilat
e me slowly and painfully. And she wasn’t just after my body. No, she craved my soul. She wanted to possess me totally and bring me down to hell. In the dream, she would almost catch me, but just as she’d be about to grab me, I’d find myself in bed, awake, and see her clinging to the iron grillwork that covered my bedroom window, giving me the evil eye and laughing madly. She didn’t have to speak. I knew exactly what she wished to do to me. And she knew I knew, and she loved it.

  Of course, I had plenty of facts from which to spin this dream. We’d recently had a maid, Caridad, who threatened me with voodoo curses. I knew she hated me. I knew her daughter, who often came to the house with her, hated me even more. Both of them taunted me whenever my parents were out of earshot. They’d tell me how much they were going to enjoy the day when I’d be cleaning their house and shining their shoes, and then they’d threaten to fill my life with voodoo curses if I ever told my parents about what they had said. I thought maybe Caridad had sent this witch to plague my dreams because my parents had fired her for stealing.

  Maybe she had.

  Then there were the dreams about all the things that had actually happened to me, or were about to happen. Those were bad enough to compete with Voodoo Woman.

  Some kind of indescribable terror possessed me totally, smothering the life out of me. I now know it was fear of death. In so many ways, I was about to die, and I knew it, at least at night. Marie Antoinette had decided that she had to get us out of Cuba as quickly as possible. My father didn’t agree with her, but somehow he was persuaded to agree with her plan. We were to be sent to the United States on our own.

  It was the only way to get us out quickly. Children didn’t need security clearances to enter the States and were given visa waivers. The parents had to wait many months for their visas, sometimes a year or more.

  Thousands of families were doing this. By the time Fidel and John Kennedy put a stop to it in October 1962, fourteen thousand children had been sent to the States all alone. So it wasn’t too weird, as far as these things go. But, of course, when a world falls apart, everything is so strange that nothing is strange. So two pampered boys who have never spent a night away from home can be sent to live in another country, where they don’t know a soul.