Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  When Daddy first laid eyes on her, he was visiting his brother up near Crawfordsville, Indiana. Mother had run out of gas. Daddy saw her walking along the side of the road and he said here came this angel. Mother had been a May Queen, and she was president of Kappa Kappa Gamma at DePauw. I had to return her sorority pin when she died. Harlan Sanders—that’s Colonel Sanders—he was from Indiana, and always in love with Mother. We were his guests at the Sanders Motor Court once, on our way to Cumberland Falls. You could tell he had that fatal thing for Mother. His hands shook and his face turned red when he greeted us. I think Daddy was amused. He didn’t mind showing her off. Mother was a beautiful woman, and she took fine care of herself. Never washed her face with soap, only cold cream, and she was health-conscious. She had the servants making yogurt back when it was still a very unusual thing to eat. Every night she sat at her desk and brushed her hair a hundred times before she went to bed. You notice those things as a boy. Twice or three times a year Daddy would take us to Miami to shop for Mother’s clothes. He’d arrange for a private room at Burdine’s. He, Del, and I would sit with Mother as the models came out in various things. If we liked what the model wore, Mother tried it on and came out and took a spin. If we agreed that it looked nice, Daddy bought it. Mother said she would never wear anything that her men didn’t approve of. At first I didn’t want to spend the afternoon in a fitting room. But then I got to liking the ritual of it, and how nice Mother dressed herself. When Del started palling around with Phillip Mackey, Del grew less interested in family things and stopped coming with us to Miami. It wasn’t as fun going without him, but it made Mother happy that I was there, and I took pride in helping her choose outfits, in being the son she could depend on. Later, when I was at military school, we dressed up for dances and functions and I knew how to put myself together because of Mother. I cared about these things. Mother said elegance was taking a plain outfit and accenting it with one flashy detail—a tie, maybe. I still think of her when I get dressed up.

  Dirt shacks, no running water—the way those people lived, it’s just how life was to me. I was a child. Mother didn’t like it, but Daddy reminded her that the company paid them higher wages than any Cuban-owned sugar operation. Mother thought it was just terrible the way the Cuban plantations did business. It broke her heart, the idea of a race of people exploiting their own kind. The cane cutters were all Jamaicans, of course—not a single one of them was Cuban—but I knew what she meant: native people taking advantage of other native people, brown against black, that kind of thing. She was proud of Daddy, proud of the fact that the United Fruit Company upheld a certain standard, paid better wages than they had to, just to be decent. She said she hoped it would influence the Cubans to treat their own kind a bit better.

  I knew something terrible had happened, watching Daddy take off like that, still wearing his pajama shirt. I ran back in to get dressed and heard Mother on the phone with Mr. LaDue, apologizing for calling so early. “Mr. Stites wanted me to call and inform you that there’s a fire in the cane fields,” she said. Of course it was a fire. Nothing else could have made that strange, orange light. “He wanted me to tell you he’s gone out there.” Even in a crisis, Mother was formal, always proper and composed. She was like that up to the very end. And it wasn’t easy for her, believe me. To lose everything. And not just the house, our whole world, but to have her oldest son up there with those people.

  Mother was in the kitchen talking to Annie, and I figured it was best to keep quiet and slip out without her noticing. Our house was next to the seawall, at the very end of La Avenida, across the street from my school, the Preston Academy for American Children. I opened the gate and headed right, toward the town square. La Avenida was the managers’ row, with a locked gate and guards at the entrance. There was a pecking order in Preston, and we were at the end of the row, in the biggest house, with our own private guards, one in the daytime and one at night. The night guards were called serenos, and one sat on our steps until dawn. It was still early—barely 6:00 A.M.—and the street was peaceful and quiet. The only sound I heard was Mrs. LaDue’s peacocks. Each house on La Avenida had an arbor at the front gate with bougainvillea, and beyond each gate, exquisite gardens. The company gardeners kept those places immaculate. A breeze was ruffling the bougainvillea, and bright pink leaves were blowing along the sidewalk. The new Unifruitco, rolled up with a rubber band, was sitting on every porch. I passed the swimming pool, where the week before we’d had a big poolside cookout for the Cabot Lodges, who were down visiting. Henry Cabot Lodge was an older fellow, but he’d been on the swim team at Harvard, and he was going off the high dive with us kids, doing flips and jackknives. The Cabot Lodges had returned to Boston a few days earlier. Now the pool was deserted and quiet. I noticed something settling on the surface of the water, a grayish film. It was ash floating down from the air.

  The guard station was at the end of the avenue. I waved to the guard and kept going. From the town square, where company headquarters and Daddy’s office were, I could see the mill off to the right. During the harvest, the mill ran on a twenty-four-hour schedule, lit up like a Christmas tree. Crushers going, cane syrup boiling, centrifugals humming. I expected to see steam drifting from the mill’s two giant chimneys, but they were both cold. Cars loaded with cut cane were sitting on the train tracks just outside the mill, waiting to be rolled in and emptied into the crushers. You can’t cut cane and leave it sitting—it turns acidic and dries out. The entire extraction process was designed for that not to happen.

  The smell of boiling cane syrup—the meladura, it’s called—used to fill the air in Preston. A warm, malty smell. I loved that smell. I can smell it right now. There was a different smell in the air that morning, not exactly familiar. I headed toward the rail crossing. I figured the flagman might know what was happening and where to find Daddy. Beyond the tennis courts were the golf course, the polo fields, then nothing but cane for miles and miles. A yellowish mutt, one of those scrawny little Cuban dogs, trotted along beside me. As I got closer to the fields, that peculiar smell was getting stronger. The dog was zigzagging and putting his nose up to sniff. The air smelled like burned sugar, a tangy, black carbon smell, like when one of Annie’s pies bubbled over and dripped onto the bottom of the oven.

  There was no flagman at the crossing, which seemed odd. Three tracks converged, and cars were always coming in. A railroad car half-filled with freshly hacked cane sat there, abandoned like someone had suddenly decided to stop working. I stepped over the ties and took the access road past a row of workers’ shanties. The workers usually had cook fires going out there in the morning, for boiling sweet potatoes that they ate while they worked in the fields. But there was no one around. Maybe it’s idiotic, but I remember thinking, If there are no cook fires, how did the cane catch fire?

  From the access road I saw a plume of black smoke going up. My next thought was that we’d been bombed. The week before, Batista had dropped white phosphorus over the Sierra Cristal, the mountains above us where the rebels were hiding. The smoke drifted over Preston, and the next day we had rain, and the rainwater covered the town with greasy soot. Rain fell in the mountains, too, but the fires up there kept burning. Water won’t put out white phosphorus; it loves moisture. The fires burned for days, killing animals and a few of the guajiros who lived up there. Guajiros, that’s one thing. Americans is another. Batista wouldn’t have bombed us. We were practically the only support he had left in eastern Cuba.

  I saw Daddy pull up in the black Buick, about a quarter mile down the road. He had Hatch and Rudy Allain riding with him. Hatch was the plantation boss. His brother, Rudy, was the guy who fixed all the mill machinery and irrigation equipment. The fire was in the southern part of our fields. As I got closer, heat baked my face and the front of my clothes. I heard the dry, licking sound of flames. Through waves of heat I could see Daddy talking to Rudy, and old Mr. LaDue running toward them from the other direction. A couple of lower management guys came ha
uling up the road in a company truck. Rudy yelled something to Daddy. I was close now, but I couldn’t hear what he said. There was a burst that sounded like an explosion. Cane is volatile, especially when it’s ready for cutting. Black smoke was filtering up so fast it looked like water running backward. Daddy picked up a cane cutter’s machete and headed toward the narrow break between two burning fields. He ran right in and disappeared in the smoke and flames.

  In Daddy’s office at company headquarters there was a big map of Oriente. Oriente was where we lived, and it was Cuba’s largest, poorest, blackest province. It has the best climate and most fertile land for growing sugarcane. Castro has it all divided up now, I don’t know why; another cockeyed thing like changing the name of our town, Preston, to “Guatemala”—which makes no sense at all. Back then the entire eastern half of the island was all one province, Oriente. On the map in Daddy’s office, United Fruit’s property was marked in green. Practically the whole map was green—330,000 acres of arable land—with one small area of gray that wasn’t ours marked “owned by others.” People have no idea, the scale of things. Fourteen thousand cane cutters. Eight hundred fifty railcars. Our own machine shops, to repair every part in the mill. Our own airstrip. Two company DC-3s, a Lockheed Lodestar and Daddy’s Cessna Bobcat, which he used for hedgehopping—surveying land or popping over to Banes, the other company mill town thirty miles away. We had our own fleet of sugar boats that went back and forth to Boston. You could sit in the Pan-American Club, which had a bank of panoramic windows perched out over the water like the prow of an ocean liner, and watch the boats coming in and being loaded with bags of raw sugar. During cutting season, our mill processed fifteen million pounds of sugar a day.

  The cane cutters were always paid their wages at the end of the season. Before the terrible thing that happened to him, Mr. Flamm, the paymaster, calculated their earnings in a giant ledger book. The workers lined up along the road, and Mr. Flamm unzipped a green leather moneybag and doled out pesos. The moneybag had a big lock on it at the end of the zipper, and the company logo embossed on the front. As each worker received his pay, Mr. Flamm crossed him off the list. He had the workers sign next to their names that they’d received their earnings in full. These guys were mostly from Jamaica. They spoke the king’s English, but practically none of them could sign their name. They were supposed to just put a check next to it instead. Some of them didn’t have last names, just nicknames. Hatch Allain stood by to make sure there was no monkey business. It was all handled in cash. They were paid straight cash, minus whatever they’d charged at the company store, the almacén. If they’d drawn off their pay, it was recorded in the ledger book. The company let them draw off their wages so they could eat before payday. None of them owned cars or mules, and they had to do their shopping in Preston. For a while, the company paid them at the end of each workday, but Daddy said it was better to hold off and pay them at the end of the season. The reason was that some of those guys who came over from Jamaica to cut the cane found out they didn’t like it so much. They deserted, never paid the company for their boat passage from Kingston. Cutting cane is brutal, brutal work, some of the hardest work in the world. Bending over all day long under broiling sun, hitting the cane with a flat-blade machete. Leaves so sharp they’ll slice you to ribbons. People get sunstroke; there were heart attacks in our fields. They have to work fast because the sugar starts to turn. The acid content rises and it ferments if the cane sits for more than a few hours. The workers cut the cane and stripped it of leaves. Tied it into bundles and loaded the bundles onto oxcarts, and from oxcarts onto cane cars, which were shunted straight into the mill for processing. It was an eighteen-hour workday, with maybe four hours of sleep. Those guys were up before dawn, and after dark they worked by the light of oil pots. If you pay people at the very end of cutting season, they stick around and finish the job.

  The cane cutters in Preston hadn’t always been Jamaican. Up through the forties, the company hired mostly Haitians. Every year Daddy went by ship to Cap-Haïtien to bring a bunch of them to Cuba for cutting season. He had a gentleman over there, an absolutely elegant Frenchman named Mr. Bloussé, who contracted for so many workers to come over and cut our cane. I was just a little teeny kid, but I remember one of those ships, a double-stacked tramp steamer, docked in the Preston bay and packed with them, black arms hanging out the open sides. They unloaded those guys from the ship and transported them in open railcars. They might have been cane cars, come to think of it. The cane cars are just cages, with oval-shaped iron bars that bow out like a whale’s rib cage, to hold cane stalks. They trundled the Haitians out to a compound, kind of a pen, and dosed them with salts. The doctor from the company hospital would go and have a look at them, Dr. Romero, who gave health certificates for servants—every servant had to have a certificate or they couldn’t work in your home. The men were examined and left in the pen for several days to make sure they didn’t have any communicable diseases, ophthalmia, or what have you. There was some nasty stuff on those ships. That one can make you blind.

  When I was boy we had iceboxes, and the ice came in a burlap sugar sack surrounded by sawdust to keep it from melting. Every day a little horse came down La Avenida pulling a cart, and the iceman delivered our hundred-pound block of ice. After payday, and just before they shipped the cane cutters back to Haiti on those double-deckers, the Haitians would go down to Mayarí and buy trunks and fill them with things to take home, gaudy silk shirts in red or yellow, trinkets, bottles of Cuban rum, that sort of thing. One fellow bought a trunk, then went and got himself a hundred-pound block of ice. Without telling anybody, this guy put the ice in his trunk and carried it with him onto the ship. When they docked in Le Cap he wanted to kill the captain because he said the captain stole his ice.

  We’d had cane fires before. When I was six, lightning hit, and several hundred acres burned. The company roused the workers, and they had almost a thousand guys out there hacking into the breaks with machetes to widen them and prevent the fire from jumping the road. They backburned so that when the fire got to the break there was nothing left to fuel it. Cane fires are notoriously difficult to put out. That morning, I could see flames spreading out across the southern part of our fields. I couldn’t imagine how they would get the fire under control, even with every last worker out there helping.

  Rudy was talking to Mr. LaDue and some other guys when I came running up. I’d never cut a break, but I grabbed a machete that was leaning against the little shed where poor Mr. Flamm—may he rest in peace—used to pay the workers. Mr. Flamm was a delicate little guy in wire-framed glasses, and they’d built him the shed so he wouldn’t have to stand in the sun as he doled out wages to the cane cutters. The machete was heavy. I couldn’t have swung it worth a damn, but I was willing to try. I started heading toward the break where Daddy had gone in. Rudy grabbed me by the shoulders and blocked my way. “Hold on, son,” he said. “We don’t need you burning yourself up in that field.” Just then, two guys pulled up in a truck and yelled to Rudy that they couldn’t get the main valve open. Rudy said to come with him. We ran over and hopped into one of the trucks. He drove us down the access road a ways and parked. There was a spigot there, the opening to the main irrigation line. Rudy bent down and started loosening the bolt on the spigot with a wrench. He took the bolt off and turned the valve wheel counterclockwise. Nothing happened. No water came out. He spun the wheel. It was all the way open.

  “Goddamnit.” He threw his wrench on the ground. The air was thick with smoke, and one of Rudy’s eyes was red and irritated. His other eye was glass. I started coughing and inched my shirt up over my mouth.

  He spun the open wheel again. “We’re shit out of luck, K.C.”

  More guys were arriving, fellows from company headquarters. Daddy’s secretary, Mr. Suarez, was with them—he might have been the only Cuban in the bunch. They had machetes, and scarves tied around their mouths. They went in at the break near the busted main valve. There were no
cane cutters out there. No mill workers, either. Just management—agriculture guys and pencil pushers from the offices.

  “The batey is a ghost town,” Hatch Allain, the plantation boss, yelled, walking toward us. “I’ve got the guards knocking on doors, getting people up around town. We should have at least a hundred guys out here soon.”

  The heat from the flames pressed against my face like I was getting a sunburn. I kept coughing, although I had the shirt up over my mouth. How Daddy could stand it in the thick of the fire is beyond me.

  Mr. LaDue came down the road, and Rudy called to him that the valve was busted and there wasn’t any water. Mr. LaDue looked even older than usual. His face was half-shaved. He had shaving cream on his neck.

  “If we don’t get the fire stopped at the access road, the whole town is going up,” he told Rudy.