Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  I told the captain I knew him from when he was little, that his employer was an old friend of my father’s. That boy was not stupid. He knew the name Stites would have more pull with the Cuban officers than Lederer or any other American in Nicaro. They let him go.

  Despite the new laws and curfews in Preston after the fire, mill equipment kept getting damaged and stolen anyway. The rebels took tractors, and put sugar in the gas tanks of Daddy’s Buick limousines. They raided his private freezers at the almacén. Daddy insisted on butchering his own meat, and he had the butchers down there wrap everything in white paper and label and stack them according to cut. The rebels left us not so much as a bag of gizzards. Maybe we have Del to thank for that. I didn’t care about steak, but I hated to see my father in a rage. It got worse in the summer of that year, when someone tossed a Molotov cocktail into Daddy’s Pullman car. There was nothing left but a charred shell. I went in there a few days after the fire. What a terrible thing, the velvet club chairs and couches just springs, like skeletons.

  I always thought of the Pullman car as Panda’s, never mind that they kept it locked after she installed herself in there and got grubby fingerprints on everything. She cut swatches out of the velvet curtains with scissors, and all the drapes had to be replaced because they didn’t have any more of the old fabric. The Allains had to pay for the damage, but no one was angry at Panda. How can you be, at a serious little girl with a birthmark that made her look as if someone had slung a glass of red wine in her face? Mr. Flamm took it out of Rudy’s paycheck a little at a time. The company was like that. Informal. They treated people as people, and families as families. If the workers had a beef with us, they were supposed to go to a Cuban guy first. His job was to try to settle things off the record, Cuban to Cuban. If a worker was causing trouble, stealing or drinking too much cane brandy on his break, this same Cuban had a word with him. A lot of the workers drank on their shift breaks instead of acting sensibly and eating a square meal. They made liquor from the syrup that was dumped after the last stage of centrifuging. “La miel final” it’s called—the final honey—and it has absolutely no taste.

  Their problems with us, ours with them—the idea was to get things straightened out native to native. It was a very old-fashioned way of doing things.

  The Rural Guard had a different philosophy. Jesús Sosa Blanco, the captain, had been let out of prison by Batista. Sosa Blanco had killed his wife, his mother-in-law, and his sister-in-law. Batista released rapists and murderers—anyone who’d enlist went free. The Rural Guard was like a local, domestic version of the French Foreign Legion, who were good enough to do dirty work in the colonies, but not to be free citizens of France. At the end, when Batista sneaked off the island, in the middle of the night, resigned finally to the fact that he’d lost and the revolution was imminent, was there space for Captain Sosa Blanco, murderer and ex-con, on the DC-4? Of course not. He was tried in the Sports Palace, where Daddy took me to see Sugar Ray Robinson fight that Christmas. Thousands of people watched from the stands as a firing squad executed him. I watched it on CBS.

  Revolutions start with fires. That’s how it was in Haiti in the 1790s. In Cuba in 1844 they had La Escalera, when the slaves burned some of the larger Spanish cane plantations in Oriente. The slaves who led these revolts were called “kings” and “queens,” and they gave the signals to torch. When the rebellion was finally quashed, the Spanish executed not just its “royal” leaders but also thousands of slaves, many of them probably innocent. Plantation owners tied the slaves to ladders—that’s “la escalera”—and whipped them to death. Of course, no one was whipped to death in Cuba in the 1950s, but what Daddy had to deal with wasn’t all that different, except there weren’t any kings and queens—only “comrades”—and it wasn’t Daddy who dealt out punishments. This is a modern state, and they had secret police—the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar, or SIM—and the Rural Guard, led by Captain Sosa Blanco. But with a history of tumult and revolts, certain ideas, certain lessons, silt in—like the belief that it’s necessary to crush these things before they get out of hand. And that the only effective way is with violence.

  It was Sosa Blanco’s idea that every native must have his hands waxed with paraffin. If the wax showed traces of nitrate, that person had fired a gun. They didn’t bother arresting people. They shot them on the spot, or worse. On the roadside between Preston and Mayarí, Sosa Blanco burned five people alive, four men and a woman who all had nitrate on their hands. He hung them from trees and started a bonfire underneath like he was roasting five New Year’s pigs. I wasn’t supposed to know about that, but Hatch told Curtis, and Curtis told me. The thing is, anyone who works on a farm and handles fertilizer is going to have nitrate on his hands.

  I started listening to the rebels’ clandestine broadcast, Radio Rebelde, every night. We couldn’t get any of the regular news. Our paper, the Havana Post, was mostly inked out in black. The only things they left for us to read were recipes for pineapple upside-down cake, want ads for light-skinned domestics, and silly columns about people like Deke and Dolly hosting charity balls. The censorship started to make the Americans uncomfortable, and I think it’s the main reason why Batista got blackballed from the Yacht Club that spring. Daddy went to Havana for the vote. Who knows what else Daddy did in Havana? You’d think one or two would vote for the president, but it was all blackballs. Batista was a mulatto. Some people said he was an achinado, which is part Chinese. Of course, color played a part in his rejection from the club.

  Clavelito was still doing his program, but I didn’t hear his voice coming from the bohios when I rode my bike down there. Everyone was tuned into Rebelde to learn what was happening. Then the rebels put Violeta Casal on the air, so you got news and you got Violeta Casal.

  Violeta Casal was a well-known actress who appeared in the print and television commercials for Pompeii laundry flakes. When I heard her silky voice reading the news reports over the radio, I had an image in my mind of the soap flakes model, a jiggly girl with dimples and dark, wavy hair. I thought about her a lot, and forgot all about Elisia Arnaz.

  Violeta Casal announced that Fidel had ordered his own family’s cane burned first because they, too, were exploitative landowners. I guess you can’t call him a hypocrite. I don’t think it was first, but they really did burn Ángel Castro’s cane fields. Fidel’s mother, Lina, was furious. The old man had died the year before. Daddy had gone to his service, at the church in Banes where Fidel married the Diaz-Hart girl.

  Violeta Casal talked about miracles, but they were different from Clavelito’s miracles, which involved winning the lottery, or cures for marital troubles, or hernias, or the chronic lateness that Clavelito said a lot of people suffered from. Violeta Casal declared that there were miraculous signs the rebels were triumphing. When the El Cobre copper mine above the city of Santiago was bombed, the only thing that wasn’t damaged was the Black Virgin in El Cobre church. Its glass case was not even cracked, while everything around it was rubble. Violeta Casal said the Black Virgin was guiding the struggle and would save the Cubans from Batista’s corruption the way she saved three miners in 1628. A ferocious storm had come in while the miners were out fishing, and their boat capsized in Nipe Bay. That’s our bay. They were drowning when the Black Virgin came toward them on a block of wood. The miners grabbed on to the wood and floated to safety. The Cubans made her the patron saint of the island. They carried her to Santiago on the old horse trail that cuts through Ángel Castro’s property. Blacks went to El Cobre to pray to the Black Virgin for healthy babies. Pardos, or lighter-skinned Cubans, prayed to the whitest saint they could find, hoping for light-skinned babies.

  For a long time, we heard nothing from Del. Daddy said it was a family issue, and not to be discussed with the other Americans. This was especially hard for Mother, having to pretend that everything was fine when her son had disappeared. Everyone knew about it anyway. Everly heard through the houseboy. You got the feeling that all the blacks
had some inside key to what was happening. I started to wonder if Annie knew. But I doubt that she did. She was practically a part of our family.

  A few weeks after the cane fire, a letter finally arrived from Del. This was in March of 1958. Del had been gone for three months, since Christmas. That was the moment when a person seemed like a stranger to me. Daddy with a whore is still Daddy. But Del’s litany, I just couldn’t attach his voice to it. He said the cane fire hadn’t caused any more damage than the phosphorus that Batista’s American-built bombers had dropped on the guajiros in the Sierra Cristal—humble people, he wrote, who were honest and working their own land, not land that rightfully belonged to someone else. He said he hoped Daddy was contemplating his association with tyrants and criminals, and that we should all be thinking about what justice meant.

  The only part that seemed like the old Del was the postscript: “As you both know, I hate to write letters. So I dictated this.”

  15

  A woman’s voice, American, echoed up to her window, cutting through a steady drumming of rain.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” the woman shrieked, plaintive and drunk. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Rachel K had spread the postcards out on the bed. Every few months one turned up in her mailbox. Greetings from the banks of the Tagus. Greetings from the banks of the Neva. Greetings from the banks of the Seine, they announced. But it was always the same image: a lithograph of a woman reclining on an ottoman piled with cushions, a gauzy band of fabric draped across her hips so she wasn’t completely nude.

  On the back of each card: “Greetings from the banks of nowhere, Christian.”

  The stamps were smudged and faint, but a few she could make out: Algiers, Dakar, and Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

  She put the cards away when she heard the familiar double honk of Batista’s driver.

  Batista was speaking on the phone. She took a seat on one of the sofas in the Green Room, its familiar gold and lime-green drapes and upholstery casting a different mood now that it was Batista’s Green Room and not Prio’s Green Room. It hadn’t been Prio’s for six years now, but Batista still seemed ill-fit to its overbearing decoration, brocade everything, and giant chandeliers.

  “I see…yes, thank you. This is wonderful news.”

  Batista put the receiver back on its cradle.

  “They’ve finally carted that moron off to jail!” He pounded his fist on the desk in satisfaction. “Indicted him for conspiring against me. He thinks he can do what he wants because he’s in Miami. But that asshole isn’t going to get away with so much as jaywalking.”

  The moron was Prio. He’d been charged with violating U.S. neutrality laws by financing Cuban insurgents. Batista had made a deal with the Americans, in exchange for Prio’s indictment. The Americans requested that Batista lift martial law in Cuba, and he did. At least in Havana, at least for a few days. Oriente, he said, was out of the question. He hadn’t trusted that the Americans would come through on their end of the deal, but as soon as Batista publicly announced the guarantee of rights, the lifted curfew, the Miami court issued a bench warrant. Police went to Prio’s home and arrested him.

  Rachel K had warned Prio that his own cook and butler in Miami seemed to be on Batista’s payroll. “You mean Guillaume?” Prio had asked in disbelief. He refused to believe that anyone who should be loyal wasn’t. Just as Batista wasn’t capable of understanding that none of the girls—Rachel K or La Paloma or any of the others—was loyal. They would never dare, Batista said, cavort with his enemies. But they did, and openly. He wasn’t aware because it was beyond the scope of what he deemed possible, even as he made himself aware of every last detail.

  He devoted the majority of his time to his paranoia, his fragile ego, to keeping meticulous accounts of who said what. He tapped telephones and offices, those of his wife, his ex-wife, his ministers, certain American businessmen, all the newspapers, and CMQ’s Clavelito, whom he suspected of putting a curse on him. The “Novel,” Batista called his daily log of wiretaps. He spent long hours every day listening to the Novel. Or reading it, if the wiretap was less sensitive and could be trusted to a secretary for transcription.

  Though he’d sent for Rachel K, he became so involved in the Novel that night that he forgot she was there, sitting on a sofa near his desk. The euphoria of Prio’s arrest consumed him. “After that exciting news, I must listen to today’s Novel developments,” he said, and eagerly slipped on a pair of headphones. Rachel K removed a small notebook and a pencil from her purse, to jot down brief notes. She was spying on Batista plainly and openly, as he spied on others with his elaborate contraptions.

  Batista took notes and interjected comments, the reels of his recording equipment clicking with each forward revolution. He spoke loudly, the headphones muffling his ears to the volume of his own voice.

  He preferred to listen to the Novel rather than to read it. And ideally to listen while it was “hot from the oven,” which meant recent. The Novel was his obsession, and he loved talking about it. Reading it, he’d once told Rachel K, could sometimes lead to information that listening could not, because those phrases that had been uttered in a breathy or inconsequential manner, trailing off, or quickly added at the end of a conversation—they were right there, typed, and of equal importance.

  The reels clicked forward, then stopped. Batista scribbled frantically with a pen.

  “I knew it!” he said, and pressed rewind, then stop, then play.

  He listened and nodded, making notations. “You go right ahead. I’ll see you here, for your ‘special plan.’” He was talking to the voices coming through the headphones. “I’ll see you and raise you! Ambush me? You’re already dead, bastard.”

  Knows DR plan, Rachel K wrote quickly in her little notebook, while Batista was too engrossed to notice. The DR, or Directorio Revolucionario, was another insurgent group, who believed that storming the palace and assassinating the president was the most effective plan of action. Fidel and the M-26 were against it. Prio was for it. He gave money to the DR and to Fidel, increasing his chances by betting on two horses. Batista seemed thrilled at the discovery. The pen trembled in his hands. The Novel, Rachel K guessed, would be too boring for him to endure if it weren’t for the masochistic promise of locating proof that he’d been betrayed. Like a jealous lover, he wanted confirmation of what he feared. The United Fruit executive was always asking her about her other liaisons. The idea seemed to hurt him, and yet he pestered her for details. When Rachel K refused, he launched into his own lurid and elaborate descriptions, savoring yet disdaining his fantasies of her and other men, like a preacher savoring yet disdaining the sin of sodomy by saying “sodomy” over and over again, as if the word itself might have some erotic effect. The executive’s own repertoire consisted of two positions, missionary and laundress—which meant from behind. Rachel K disliked the laundress position, not because she wanted to look at him—she didn’t—but because old men had pincers for hands, which reached around and clutched her in a brittle and insistent manner that she found unpleasant.

  “You let two of these guys do you at once?” the executive asked her. “They do you doggy-fashion? On all fours?”

  She laughed at him and he laughed with her, certain that he was in on whatever was funny. Then he inevitably grew excited by the idea of these scenes, quit with the laughter, and ordered her to take off, as he called them, her drawers.

  She’d fallen asleep on the couch in Batista’s office by the time he finished with that day’s Novel developments. He woke her but didn’t gruffly escort her, as she assumed he would, to the secret chamber behind the bookshelves, furnished with a bed, Baltimore candy, and stacks of pornographic magazines.

  He stood over her, distress creasing his face. She knew this crease, which grew more visible when he tried to suppress it.

  “Who blackballed me,” he asked her, “from the Yacht Club?”

  He was upset about not being admitted to the right club.

 
; “How would I know? As if I’m a member,” she said, unzipping him to end the conversation.

  GOD AND BATISTA blazed in green neon letters from the roof of the palace.

  That was new, La Mazière thought, looking up at the glowing message. And why not? Why not convert the palace to an evangelical casino, caboose your name to God’s?