Telex From Cuba

by Rachel Kushner

  “Viva Castro!”

  “Viva La Revolución!”

  The Rural Guardsmen standing at the front smiled uncomfortably. One managed a limp clap of his hands amid the ocean of applause.

  Castro asked if a Señor Suarez was in the crowd, and if so, would he please step forward. A delicate-looking man in spectacles moved toward the front, people making room for him to pass.

  Señor Suarez, Castro explained, had been left in charge by the Americans. For the first time in history a Cuban would be running the mill. For the first time in history, La United would pay their taxes. It was almost crushing season, and they would have a glorious harvest.

  “This revolution,” Castro said, “is for the cane cutters. It’s time for them to take their cut. And for Cuba to take hers.”

  He said the revolution was beginning, but that it wouldn’t be an easy process, that it was a road full of danger.

  “So many times now,” he said, “our revolution has been betrayed. In 1898, when the Americans invited themselves to rape our Cuba like a waterfront whore. Disposable, syphilitic, and worthy only of contempt. In 1952, when Batista betrayed the people. Again and again, those who claimed purity of heart turned out to be thieves and riffraff. For the first time in four centuries, this republic will be free. For the first time ever, it will be true to its revolution. Fatherland or death: it is our choice.”

  Despite the romantic tone, La Mazière appreciated Castro’s obvious love for revolution as La Mazière himself loved it, purely, and for its own sake. True revolution was attitude and passion, not ideas and ideology, something Castro seemed to understand well. It was an epic of methods, not aims. Aims would come later, but what form they’d take was anyone’s guess. In his radio speeches, Castro had spoken repeatedly about a New Man, who didn’t fit into the old commonplace sloth of bourgeois democracy. He talked about a classless and authentic society, true to its cultural heritage, true to its heroes, in which virility, not privilege, was revered. He told his audiences they were the true elite, the unshaven, the unwashed, whose spirit is forged in action. The elite, he said, is not the man who uses the correct dinner fork. The elite is the man who knows how to eat with his hands.

  Castro’s words gave off faint echoes, La Mazière thought, of Drieu and Brasillach, minus certain more drastic elements. Not that Castro’s vision was the same as Drieu’s or Brasillach’s. But his idealism, like theirs, was radically unstable, as was all idealism.

  There was an impromptu party after Castro’s speech, in a rounded building with enormous windows that jutted over the bay like an ocean liner. Behind an elegant mahogany bar were signs in English describing variously flavored daiquiris—pineapple, coco, and lemon-lime.

  In the center of the club’s tiled dance floor there was a charred cavity, and another hole in the hallway where the bathrooms were located, shattered mirror fragments underfoot. The place had been bombed but not wrecked. The jukebox still worked, and music blared from it, a deluxe-model Wurlitzer stocked exclusively with Cuban songs—a detail of the place that La Mazière found oddly touching. He read it as some shred of desire, on the part of these now absent Americans, to assimilate, to claim that the Cuban music was as much theirs as it was anyone’s, because they loved it as much as anyone else loved it. Even if a love that derived from proprietary was a kind of profound ignorance, it touched him all the same. The Americans had clearly loved the foliage, the daiquiris, the Cuban music. He could feel it in their empty town, the ghostly imprint of their naive and imperialist love.

  Soldiers and locals, mill workers and cane cutters and their children all danced, careful not to step in the charred hole in the center of the tiled dance floor. They did the mambo, the pachanga, the cha-cha-cha, or rather “cha-cha,” as La Mazière had learned this Cuban dance was properly called, the third “cha” one more American excess.

  People went behind the bar and made themselves drinks, American whiskeys and English gins. La Mazière, too, helped himself to the American whiskey. Having gone without such luxuries for several months now, his constitution was almost virgin to its eighty-proof. The warmth spread quickly through him, his cells catching fire in a manner that was entirely pleasant.

  The rebels would be going to Santiago to pay their respects to the Black Virgin, then onward, in a slow and meritorious caravan to Havana. Batista had fled two days before, on New Year’s Eve, and overnight the revolution had come to fruition. The rebels were the state as they danced in an abandoned American social club, drinking English gin and doing the mambo, careful not to step in the dance floor crater.

  La Mazière began to feel himself receding from the scene, as if he were not a full participant in these festivities, a mind that was not part of their collective fabric, their revelry, but attached to something outside it.

  He stepped onto the club’s veranda and gazed at the endless blue water. Nipe, the largest bay in Cuba, so integral to the weapons shipments he’d arranged. There were smaller fishing boats and pleasure craft tied along the dock, and larger vessels, a barge and a United Fruit Company freighter anchored offshore. What was beyond the blue? The Bahamas, he guessed, to the north. And south and east, around the crenellated corner of the island, Hispaniola. Duvalier and his humility. Trujillo and his makeup.

  The rebels were the state, and overnight. A transition that was not unlike a man waking up to discover he’d somehow married his mistress. A gesture that would surely kill the allure of romance, of luminous desire, in the very fact of its guarantee. Like killing the allure of a new government, a new power structure, in the very fact of its installment. He gazed at the watery horizon, indulging in a childlike wonder at the simple fact that there were unseen worlds beyond the blue. “The sea! The sea!” the soldiers cried out. He felt an old familiar hunger beginning to announce itself, the desire to dissolve back into civilian life and witness the rest of this thing, the completion of revolution’s arc, from a cozily anonymous vantage.

  He knew this part of the equation, the end of an arc, the waking up, the exorcism. Purges, kangaroo courts, justice. Lots of justice, for which the rebels would wish they’d saved those sky-aimed victory bullets.

  He slipped out and headed toward a destroyed railcar sitting on a pair of tracks beyond the sugar mill. He walked along the tracks, which cut through an ocean of silver-green sugarcane, and eventually reached the main highway. He was in remote territory, but someone would have to come down the road sooner or later. Perhaps an American family who hadn’t left in the mass exodus, optimists pressing their luck. He could claim he’d been a hostage in the mountains, kidnapped along with one of the groups that Raúl had held for several weeks. He’d explain that he was a Frenchman, wanting only to return to Paris.

  He had little luck. The rebels had sealed the eastern half of the island, and almost no one had fuel. The few who did were not stopping. He walked until well after dark, and spent the night in a cane field.

  Late the next morning, he was drudging along the side of the highway, the sun burning a hole in his back, when a car stopped—a roomy, brand-new Buick sedan, a wealthy Cuban family inside. They gave him passage all the way to Havana and asked no questions, which he found remarkable in its gentility, its politeness.

  The journey was twenty hours, with lengthy delays at checkpoints manned by rebels glowering officiously, despite their rusted weapons and mismatched uniforms. One particularly insolent young soldier had been eating an enormous piece of bread, crumbs tumbling down the front of his shirt as he demanded the driver’s identification and an explanation of their “movements.”

  “Who’s he?” the soldier asked, pointing at La Mazière. “A médico,” the driver said. “He was helping in the East.” La Mazière stayed quiet, impressed at the gentleman’s spontaneous tact, regretful that a devolution into bureaucracy was already taking effect. After a battery of questions, the soldier waved them through.

  Gazing at the series of mirages that pooled up ahead on the highway, one after another, La Maz
ière understood that while he missed Paris, he wasn’t so anxious to return. Paris held no mirages, just familiar comforts, Dalida, whose wet, gleaming eyes offered an alluring violence, and yet her melodramas, silly and uncomplicated, bored him terribly after more than a few hours in her presence. Even her beauty was static and predictable. Rachel K’s, on the other hand, was somehow transitive. It acted upon him.

  My Woodsie gives radiant joy.

  He thought of the blue-lit body, the firm-jelly breasts. Watching her, pleased and amused, from his table in the back of the Pam-Pam Room.

  He’d never conceived of a dalliance with a fellow troublemaker, an insurgent, if that’s what she was. The gulf of secrets he kept seemed disarmingly mirrored in her, a girl who might keep her own gulf of secrets. She was rarely forthcoming about anything. She’d claimed, more than once, that she wasn’t Cuban. “And yet you speak only Spanish,” he’d said. “You say ‘Lucky Strye’ when you want a cigarette. And the way you operate, friend of this and that politician, thug, and revolutionary…you’re certainly a savvy foreigner.”

  “Like I’ve told you,” she’d said, “my grandfather was from Europe. I take after him.”

  To which La Mazière had replied that she seemed not only Cuban but quintessentially so. He was lying. He didn’t know what she seemed. If anything, she looked middle European, ghosting some ethnic riddle, a living clue that someone, at some point—a grandfather, perhaps—had been roaming someplace he didn’t belong. You might as well be the brochure cover girl, La Mazière said to her, for—forgive him—that tacky rapture-promising tourist slogan “Caribbean fleshpot.”

  “Maybe it’s only your rapture,” she’d said.

  “I can’t thank you enough. I think this is where I get out.”

  They were caught in a traffic jam, amid the victory cavalcade of cars, trucks, motorcycles, and jeeps. In front of them, a confiscated Sherman tank was being towed on a flatbed truck.

  La Mazière waved good-bye and set out walking along Máximo Gomez, a wide boulevard with chipped, pastel-painted porticos. Above the colonnades were enormous Spanish-colonial homes painted in rich creams, custard yellows, pale pinks, and pistachio greens, like rows of éclairs and meringues in a patisserie display case. He walked in the shade of the porticos, passing newspaper stands and lottery ticket hawkers, vendors selling peanuts, cane juice, and candy.

  Block after block, he floated in the heady rush that came with reentering a place that was familiar but had been temporarily forgotten. He walked quickly, in a state of euphoric anxiety, as if the city’s existence without him must somehow and suddenly be recaptured.

  He stopped at a barbershop for a shave. He’d had the momentous shave after the deprivations of war before. The shave of shaves, more momentous than that first sip of whiskey. The faint gardenia aroma of the lather, a tacit agreement among barbers and men that fragrance was acceptable, even desired, as long as it remained faint. He lay in a green vinyl chair, his feet propped, his arms on the armrests, his eyes closed for this meditation, the passage to a groomed state of being.

  As he reached the Prado, patting his smooth cheeks and damp, trimmed hair, he heard an amorandola, the same musician strumming it who seemed always to be there, on a recessed bench under the laurel trees, singing the same song that La Mazière had heard him sing before.

  “Bonanza, bonanza, we’ll all be rich! Bonanza, bonanza, the sea is calm—”

  The sea was not calm, La Mazière was pleased to observe, as he got closer to the presidential palace and the heart of the old part of town. When he turned onto Zulueta, he encountered an energetic mob of boys and men with sledgehammers, systematically decapitating the parking meters that lined the street. Coins vomited onto the sidewalk and were promptly scooped into plastic bags. A man held the head of a parking meter up in victory, and in one smooth movement, like a javelin thrower, lobbed it through the plate-glass window of a clothing boutique. Others knocked out the remaining jagged shards of glass, and people climbed in and began undressing the mannequins, trying on clothing and taking what they wanted, leaving the mannequins nude, their joints turned in inhuman directions, heads lolling. La Mazière remembered being amused to learn that it had once been illegal in the United States for display window mannequins to go unclothed. A ridiculous and prudish law, and yet he admired it, in its passion for symbolism. That people had faith in a plastic model to carry some threat of real nudity? Marvelous, he thought, it was just marvelous.

  He drifted toward Vedado, wondering which way the buoyant looting would go, erupt into mob rule, or be immediately quashed.

  Near the Hotel Nacional a house was being ransacked, furniture tossed from second- and third-floor windows, expensive-looking things, and none of it was being salvaged—perfectly good furniture, a television, refrigerator, a tabletop radio. A woman in curlers and house slippers dumped kerosene from a large can onto the home’s defenestrated contents. Someone threw a match, and thin blue flames rolled like liquid over the pile, which quickly grew into a face-warming blaze. The home had belonged to Colonel Ventura, La Mazière overheard, Havana’s police captain.

  The looting subsided later in the afternoon, when Castro sent orders that anyone caught stealing would be shot. Castro called a general and immediate strike, which effectively kept people off the streets. The casinos were closed. The shops were closed. The hotels were open. La Mazière “checked in” to the Nacional—he attempted to pay, but the clerk would not accept his money, explaining that he was leaving to honor the strike, and the cash registers were locked. Take a tip, then, said La Mazière, but the boy would take nothing, said to enjoy the hotel, and that everyone should have something gratis this special week. No one, though, would be in to clean the room.

  “You can be sure of that,” a voice said. La Mazière turned around. It was his old hotel barmate, the forlorn little maharaja.

  “I was given no choice but to break into the linen closet down the hall,” the maharaja said, “and change my own bedsheets.” He’d heard the new government would be sealing hotel safe deposit boxes any day. It was the final straw, he told La Mazière. He was getting a flight to the Dominican Republic and hoping for the best. La Mazière wished him luck, wondering why people who seemed so broken by their own uprootedness would choose to live in hotels.

  As the clerk handed him his room key, La Mazière asked if any of the cabarets were open.

  Most, the boy said, were closed.

  What about the Tokio?

  The Tokio was closed. The owner of the club fled the island yesterday. They’re all getting on planes. They’ve had a lot of bad luck at the Tokio, the boy said. The piano player’s hands were blown off earlier in the month, a bomb under the lid of his baby grand, a terrible tragedy. And one of the Pam-Pam Room dancers, murdered by the secret police.

  Did the boy know which of the dancers?

  He’d heard she was Batista’s mistress, but he didn’t know her name. He didn’t cavort with those kinds of girls, he said, because his mother believed they were harlots and that they all had the pox, and if he ever so much as stepped foot in one of those places—

  My Woodsie gives radiant joy. But then she takes it away.

  26

  Mother felt that we were abandoning Del. She said nothing tore her up more than the thought of her son coming home, hoping to clean up, be fed a sandwich and reunited with his loving mother, and to find the house empty and locked, the whole town vacated. It broke her heart. But going to Haiti meant at least we weren’t so far away. Haiti was only a hundred miles east of Guantánamo. From the balcony of the Hotel Mont-Joli in Le Cap, where we were staying, Daddy pointed toward the blue horizon and declared to Mother that if she squinted carefully she could see Preston. “Yes, I see it!” Mother exclaimed, “that cluster of green—those are the palm groves of Saetía, right?” Daddy nodded and said he believed she was correct—Saetía, surely.

  You couldn’t see Preston or Saetía from the balcony of the Mont-Joli. What Mother saw was
Turtle Island, just west of us, and it wasn’t actually so green.

  Daddy said the move to Le Cap was temporary, but he had Hilton Hardy and Henry Das pack up and ship us most of our belongings from Preston.

  Daddy was optimistic. He’d helped broker the deal with the weapons from England. The Cuban government just needed some support, he said. The State Department had abandoned Batista, but with England’s help he might regain control and stamp out the rebels.

  If Batista’s government crumbled, Daddy was prepared for that. He had guys deep in negotiation with Castro. In the middle of a war, there’s always time to stop and talk about taxes and tariffs and who’s going to collect what. Not that different from what he accused Lito Gonzalez of doing, but Daddy didn’t endanger American lives the way Gonzalez did, radioing that the town was being attacked by rebels so that Batista would send bombers over. Gonzalez hoped to take over, but that didn’t last long. I heard he escaped to the Dominican Republic in the Nicaro yacht when Castro and his government started killing Batistianos.

  No matter who came out on top, we would wait in Le Cap until things settled down. Life would eventually return to normal. The company had worked with every government, installed or elected, it didn’t matter, since 1898. We’d work with Castro.

  If there was nothing to see from the balcony of the Mont-Joli, from the top of the massive fortress south of Le Cap, one could actually glimpse the eastern tip of Cuba on a clear day. I took a trip out there by myself one afternoon and roamed the citadel and the ruins of Sans-Souci, King Henri Christophe’s palace. It was four stories of crumbling pink bricks, grass growing up among its foundation stones and what remained of the enormous stairs. The brick mortar was pink, too, supposedly made of limestone, molasses, and cow’s blood. Sans-Souci had been ravaged by time and a couple of earthquakes, but even pristine it was difficult to imagine that a pink palace built of sugar and blood would be inspiring to a population of freed slaves. They had a new king, black instead of white, on a new gold throne, importing his robes and crown from France, his Lipizzaner stallions from Vienna—the idea of it is absurd and nightmarish. But maybe it’s unfair to blame a black king for mimicking French notions of empire. King Christophe built Sans-Souci while Napoleon was conquering most of Europe, and why should anyone expect democracy in Haiti before it happened in France?