Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  As more men appeared, Rudy and Hatch were yelling instructions, where to go into the cane fields and how deep to cut. I wanted to help out. I said, “Rudy, Hatch, put me to work.” But Rudy said I should go home and have my mother call Mr. Smith, the American ambassador. What Ambassador Smith could do about a cane fire was beyond me, but I did what he said.

  The cloud of smoke from the fire was shifting out over the bay. It looked like a massive black ocean liner moving across the sky. Ash was flaking down over the town as I ran back to the house to give Mother Rudy’s message. It was like falling snow, lacy gray flakes that sifted through the air and wafted back up on the hot drafts from the blaze. Maybe it was more like fake snow in a snow dome than real snow. It just whirled around, a circular blizzard of cane ash.

  Mr. Bloussé, who contracted the workers from Haiti, came to visit us once in Preston. He was dashing like a movie star, blond hair pomaded and shiny, a silk ascot tied around his neck. He wore French-tailored shirts with black onyx cuff links and military jodhpurs. A servant stood behind him, a young Haitian boy who was quiet as a mouse, a curious boy. Mr. Bloussé would snap his fingers and say something to the boy in French, and the boy would scamper off to run some errand. I figured he spoke only French or some version of it, a native patois, but on one occasion Mr. Bloussé’s little Haitian boy spoke to me in English. Mr. Bloussé was in the parlor with Daddy, and the boy stopped me in the hall and asked if we had any books he could look at. This boy carried luggage and shined Mr. Bloussé’s shoes. He stood patiently in the hall like he didn’t have a thought in his head. And yet apparently he was able to read, and in English. I gave him some magazines to look at, and asked him how he learned. He said Mr. Bloussé taught him. That it was part of his training. I don’t know what sort of training. Later, that same boy ended up working for the Lederer family in Nicaro. One of the Lederers’ daughters, Everly, the redhead, used to follow him around. It was the same boy, but he was a grown-up by then—just one more Haitian servant in Nicaro, except he had this curious history, which I knew about.

  Mr. Bloussé brought Luxenil lace for Mother, and for Daddy a bottle of expensive cognac. He and Daddy drank and smoked cigars late every night. Daddy collected liquors from all over the world. On a mahogany cart he had miniature glass bears from Russia filled with kümmel, and bottles of yellow and green Chartreuse—the yellow glowed; it looked like it had a lightbulb shining up through the glass from underneath. He had orgeat and syrupy white crème de menthe in cut-crystal decanters. Spanish cider, and pear brandy that had a whole pear floating in the bottle. That one was from Portugal. The bottle was clear and the fruit loomed up like a fish under the surface of a pond. The younger guys in management came over to sit in the parlor, drink cognac, and visit with Mr. Bloussé. He’d been in the French Foreign Legion, he’d traveled all over the world. Zanzibar, you name it. Everybody admired him. He was wealthy, with a magnificent estate in Cap-Haïtien. I remember him talking about his three daughters. They were just old enough to get married, maybe seventeen or eighteen. Some of the guys in management wanted to set up meetings with Mr. Bloussé, to court the daughters. I imagined them as tropical French princesses, pretty girls in elaborate costumes, hand servants fanning them with palm fronds in a courtyard.

  “Yes, I’m aware that His Excellency is in Havana, but my husband feels he ought to know,” Mother said to someone at the embassy.

  “Call the fire department? Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, I’m not sure why he wanted me to call, but there must have been some reason. If you could forward the message, that this is Evelyn Stites, calling on behalf of Malcolm Stites, and we’ve got quite a blaze on our hands.”

  “Yes, ma’am, we’ve called the fire department.”

  Mother was too polite to tell the embassy receptionist that this was United Fruit territory, and we were the fire department.

  After she made the call, Mother started crying and held on to me and wouldn’t let go. Crying was something Daddy didn’t tolerate. I knew this was her chance to get it out. I didn’t tell her what Mr. LaDue had said about the town going up in flames. I didn’t need to. Through the window we could both see Ho, our gardener, aiming his hose up to wet the roof and the sides of the house.

  By noon, the smoke coming from the cane fields was so thick it blotted out the sun. It was the middle of the day and we had the dregs of twilight, like it was nine o’clock on a summer night. Mother and Annie and the other servants were rushing around putting damp towels up against the window sashes and under the doors. Ambassador Smith’s secretary, or maybe his secretary’s secretary, called to say she was still trying but had not yet located His Excellency. Ambassador Smith was never in his office when Daddy needed him. If the workers went on strike, or there was some misunderstanding with Batista’s people about export dues, Daddy called and the ambassador took his sweet time dealing with it, busy playing golf at the yacht club or hosting a charity ball. He was a real high society New England type, Yale University, all of that. The Havana Yacht Club was so exclusive that they blackballed the president of Cuba. Batista was a mulatto from Banes, the other United Fruit town. His father had worked for us as a cane cutter. Batista had worked for us, too, for the company railroad. He started out as an assistant to a chauffeur on a company line car—that’s an automobile with flanged wheels, it runs on the track—and was eventually promoted to flagman.

  I was in the parlor listening to the radio, to see if I could find out what was happening in the mountains. It hadn’t occurred to me that the fire was deliberately set, but my instinct had been to try to tune in the rebels’ wireless broadcast, Radio Rebelde. It was on the twenty-meter band, at 5:00 and 9:00 P.M. every night, and came in perfectly clear. Daddy didn’t allow it, but I listened when he wasn’t around, thinking maybe I could find out something about my brother. They talked about Raúl’s column, and this and that victory, and the horrific phosphorus bombings in the mountains, and once I heard something about “brave foreigners” helping the cause. But no one ever mentioned Del by name. It seems surprising in retrospect that they missed such a whopping opportunity for propaganda. The oldest son of enemy number one, the head of La United, had joined the cause, and they aren’t using it.

  When the fellows from Preston and Nicaro were kidnapped a few months later—in the summer of that year, 1958—the rebels invited a photojournalist from Life to go up to the Sierra Maestra and visit their camp. From the magazine pictures it looked like those guys were having one hell of a party up there, kidnappers and hostages drinking rum and smoking cigars, goofing off and lying around barefoot in hammocks. Mr. Lederer from Nicaro posed with a rebel’s hip holster, a drawn gun, and the caption said the Cubans had nicknamed him “Desperado.” What sort of kidnapping is that? The rebels managed to look like real heroes—romantic-type revolutionaries—right there in the pages of Life magazine. It would have been quite a scandal that they had an American boy on their side. And not just any boy, but a poster child for American “imperialismo”—Delmore Stites, son of Malcolm Stites, manager of the United Fruit Company’s Cuba Division.

  I fiddled with the radio set and finally got Rebelde. It sounded like they’d closed down the highway east of Camagüey. They had a reputation for overstating their advances, and I didn’t really believe it. I heard the parlor door open and quickly switched off the broadcast. A man covered with soot was standing in the doorway. He looked like a chimney sweep, charred from head to toe. The hair on his head was burned off in patches. It was Daddy. His eyebrows were gone. So was his mustache. He had a banged-up gas can in his hand, a green and yellow company can like the ones in Rudy’s machine shop. He stood there and didn’t say a word, just tossed the gas can on the parlor floor. It bounced on the wood, empty. Daddy never wore anything but the white ducks. He was the picture of a United Fruit man, tall and intimidating in his perfectly pressed suit. And here he was, his white pants filthy, jacket gone. Wearing his pajama shirt, the sleeves rolled up, burned patches on his
hands and arms that were the color of raw steak.

  The dented gas can lay on the parlor floor, its cap missing. Daddy stood over it in his burned, soot-smeared clothes. He looked too dirty to sit down on his own furniture.

  “Found this out there in the fields,” he said.

  I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to respond or keep quiet. I knew what it meant. Someone set the fire. If the cane operation was anybody’s, it was Daddy’s. The idea that people would want to destroy it, it was like they wanted to destroy him. And us.

  “It’s disgusting what these people are willing to do.” He started coughing. “Those son of a bitches.” His voice was almost gone from the smoke. “Those goddamn son of a bitches. This is what they call negotiating?”

  Daddy sat down in the chair across from me and put his head in his hands.

  “They say they want to do business, work out a deal. And the next thing you know, they’re trying to burn us to the ground.”

  I didn’t know it at the time, but Daddy had been sending messages up into the mountains, trying to negotiate with Raúl. By that point, the American managers in Oriente saw the writing on the wall and everybody was scrambling to keep the door open with the rebels, hoping to keep their operations running, their sweetheart deals and tax-free status, in case the rebels were suddenly the new government. Daddy was still dealing with Batista, of course—he was the president—but Batista had lost control of Oriente. That was a fact, but people in Havana, Ambassador Smith, and Batista’s army generals—these guys were in denial. So Daddy had taken it upon himself to get a line of communication going. I’m sure he was trying to get Del back as well. The problem was that Del didn’t want to come home.

  “We had a deal,” Daddy said, “and the deal was, I work with them and they leave us alone. I sent a letter up there to Raúl Castro. They’ve got it in writing. And they turn around and attack us.”

  My father had never confided in me about these sorts of things. Work was work, and he hung it up at the door; that was his rule.

  “I personally promised this faggot Raúl that I’d get Dulles on the horn and stop the arms shipments. And I did—I held up my end of the bargain—and this is what I get: a bunch of natives running out of the hills and starting fires.”

  The gray area marked “owned by others” on the map in Daddy’s office was a decent-sized plantation near Birán, fifteen miles southwest of us. It belonged to Don Ángel Castro, Fidel and Raúl’s father. He had acquired a lot of property down there for some unusual reason. I don’t know how he did it—moving fence lines, probably. He sold his cane to us, but he wouldn’t sell the land. Everybody knew the family. The kids, especially Raúl and Fidel, would lurk down in Mayarí, at the pool halls and the cockfights, when they were visiting from Havana, where they all went off to school. Later, Fidel said that when they were growing up they weren’t allowed into Preston, or invited to any of our social functions or permitted to use our beaches. But they were not employees of the United Fruit Company, and it was all private property, every last bit of it. And even if they had been employees, Cubans weren’t allowed certain places, like the Pan-American Club. But they wouldn’t have wanted to go to our club. Everybody kept to themselves. American with American. Cuban with Cuban. Jamaican with Jamaican. I remember thinking Raúl was a fruity type. People said he was like that. You know what I mean. A maricón. And they said he had a Chinese mother—he was Oriental-looking, and people were suspicious about that. I don’t know if there was more to it than just gossip. Fidel’s mother was the old man’s maid—Lina—she had a withered arm from polio. Del and I used to go hunting up in Birán, guinea hens and blue pigeons, and we’d see Don Ángel sitting on the porch in his guayabera, a big cigar in his mouth. We always stopped and said hello. The first time he invited us up for a glass of water, I couldn’t help staring at Lina’s withered arm, fascinated the way boys are. That place was in true guajiro style, the house up on stilts, with chickens and goats running around underneath it.

  Months before the fire started, Daddy had begun to suspect that some of the cane cutters were rebel sympathizers. He had Rev. Crim reporting on the workers. And you might call it racist, especially nowadays, but it was reasonable to assume that anybody black—whether they were Cuban, Haitian, Jamaican—was trouble. Two months before the fire was set, one of the cane cutters had gone into Mr. Flamm’s office to see him. He wanted chits so he could draw off his pay and get credit at the almacén. But he’d already overdrawn what he would make for the whole cutting season. Some of these guys were foolish about that. They’d get chits to buy appliances at the company store and turn around and sell them in Mayarí for a quarter of what they were worth, just to have the money. Spend it on rotgut or lottery tickets. By the time payday rolled around they had nothing coming. They were working like dogs for no pay, just to get out of debt with the company. This cane cutter and Mr. Flamm had an argument. Mr. Flamm wouldn’t give him any store credit and tried to show him the books and explain why, but the guy wasn’t having any of it. What a shame. There is no reason to bring a machete into company headquarters. Mr. Flamm was a little teeny man in his wire-framed glasses. If only somebody had stopped the guy before he went in carrying that machete. After that, Hatch said no blacks in the offices. Mr. Flamm bled to death right there in the accounting office. That’s not politics, it’s mental illness. There were lots of cane cutters, thousands of them, and as I said, they barely had names. They came over on boats from Kingston and lived in these hovels. The one who killed Mr. Flamm ran off. I don’t know if they ever caught him.

  The company guys who wanted to court Mr. Bloussé’s daughters came to our house to meet with Mr. Bloussé. There were three of them, and they showed up with their hair combed flat, in dinner jackets, smelling of Vitalis. They were bachelors, bored and lonely. They had good pay, no expenses, free housing; everything was provided by the company. But there was no place to go, nothing to spend the money on, and they couldn’t date the Cuban girls. At least not the upper-class, light-skinned girls. The Cubans didn’t allow it: Americans were mongrels as far as they were concerned. We didn’t have the right blood. Rich Cubans, the planters and politicians, they sent their children to be educated in Europe—Paris or Madrid—not the United States. They wanted their daughters to marry Spanish aristocrats, not some rube from Kansas. If these fellows did manage to get a date with a Cuban girl, they were expected to sit on the porch with her mother, her sister, her grandmother—a stern dueña in a black lace shawl, policing the situation. In Oriente, you never went out with a young Cuban girl alone. But these guys weren’t used to any of that, so they cut corners. Daddy said he lost a lot of good people, really fine employees, because of the trouble they got themselves into with Cuban women. Daddy was sensitive about those things. We may have owned the land, but Daddy had to deal with Cubans to keep things running smoothly with Batista, the Rural Guard, these sorts of Latin factotums, and it was better to fire an employee than to offend anyone. Daddy made it a policy to send fat old Jamaican women to work in bachelors’ homes. The younger the employee, the fatter and older and uglier the maid. No young, pretty servants for those guys. Daddy himself always had a male secretary. He worked late hours, and said he didn’t want his secretary leaving to go fix dinner for her family.

  Mr. Bloussé came back to Preston and he brought his wife and the three daughters. They stayed at the company hotel down by the docks—like everything else in town, I’m sure it’s fallen into an awful state at this point. I’ve seen pictures and it’s terrible how they haven’t taken care of those places. They cram ten families in each house and let the buildings rot, no paint, no maintenance. It was a very elegant hotel, with dark red walls and mahogany furniture. Mr. Bloussé and his wife and daughters checked in and then came to our house for dinner. When they arrived, Mother’s mouth nearly dropped to the floor. Mr. Bloussé’s wife was Haitian—she was black, and I mean black, and so were the daughters. Annie didn’t want to serve them. I think she felt it w
as an insult to have to wait on other blacks, and such dark ones, too. There are codes to these things. The bachelors who’d come over to impress Mr. Bloussé with their greased hair and Vitalis, they got wind of it and none of them showed up to meet the daughters. The courtships were called off. The guys all joked about it afterward, said Mr. Bloussé was a nigger-lover and a mud shark. But I never heard Daddy mention it. I knew he disapproved of race mixing. The Cubans did it sometimes, they dated black, and they called their girlfriends mi negrita. And the Chinamen married Cubans because they had to. There weren’t any Chinese women. Maybe that’s why people accused the Chinamen of being homosexuals. And why people accused Raúl Castro of it—because he looked part Chinese. We had two Chinamen at the house, one for the vegetable garden and one for the flowers. Daddy had a whole village of them, to work the centrifugals at the sugar mill. It was hot as Hades in that room. As the centrifugals stirred the boiling cane syrup, the last impurities bubbled up and the sugar crystals got spun out. The Chinamen wore little underwear like Speedo bathing suits as they worked. The Cubans refused to do that job because of the heat. Each Chinaman had a cup of salt and a bucket of water, and they wore the little Speedos because it was like 140 degrees in there. They would just sweat, sweat, sweat.

  “As you can see,” Mr. Bloussé said to Daddy that night when we sat down to dinner, “I’m doing my part to blanchir the population.” He gestured to the wife and daughters. During dinner, Mr. Bloussé told a story about a ship where ophthalmia spread. Everyone on the ship, including the captain and his helmsman, caught it and went blind, and they plowed right into another steamer. Daddy laughed and seemed relaxed, as if he admired Mr. Bloussé as much as he had before we knew he had a colored family. I was a young boy and this was confusing to me, why something Daddy disapproved of was suddenly okay. I figured it had to do with Mr. Bloussé being French and exotic and debonair. Like maybe the very rich didn’t have to abide by the same rules as everybody else. Mother and Daddy didn’t even want me hugging Annie so tightly. Mother was a liberal, but not too liberal. Mother said Annie’s smell rubbed off on me—she’d sniff me to check. Annie did have a smell, sort of musky. I loved it. I can smell it right now. When I was little I let her hug me when they weren’t around. She squeezed me tight. It was a wonderful, safe feeling, my face buried in her apron so I could barely breathe. She called me muñequito, her little doll. I don’t remember if she had any children of her own. Maybe she did, but I think they lived in Mayarí. Annie lived with us. Once, in a taxicab here in Tampa, the driver was some type of black Caribbean and his cab smelled like Annie.