Memory Mambo

by Achy Obejas

  Apparently, my father was not recruited by the CIA for his invention, but because he had an uncanny ability to procure boats to get people out of the island. He always says this was because, being the son of one of Havana’s oldest and most prosperous families, he knew all the boat owners—all members of the Miramar Yacht Club, which was much more prestigious than the Havana Yacht Club—and was in a good position to cut deals. He’d either guarantee safe passage for the boat if they took a hot passenger (artists, government officials, dissidents of all kinds), or he’d buy the boat outright with CIA dollars.

  Patricia says this is all invention, that we weren’t as high class as my father wants us to believe, and that more likely than not, he was stealing the boats—if, in fact, any of the story is true at all.

  “You know, I played an important part in getting Fulgencio Batista out of Cuba on that fateful New Year’s Eve in 1959,” my father told Gina and Jimmy, both of whom kindly didn’t mention that my father would have been just a kid in 1959, or that they knew the old dictator had left the island by plane, not boat.

  I remember watching Gina during this part, terrified she’d be unable to keep from laughing. I remember too how relieved I was when she kept a straight face, and the little smile she gave me, as if saying, Don’t worry, I know he’s your father, I’m not going to say anything upsetting, I love you, okay?

  I know for a fact my father doesn’t do well with challenges. Patricia, whose father Raúl Fonseca (the rich and famous artist) actually fought with Fidel against Batista, confronted Papi once about his age in 1959 and his alleged participation in the old dictator’s escape but he didn’t even blink: “Look, I was a very mature teenager—people in Cuba were more mature, everybody knows that—and you’re supposed to think Batista left by plane,” Papi snorted in reply.

  Jimmy played along with my father like everybody else, but he went further: praising his courage and asking questions. Were there any celebrities among the people he got out of Cuba? What kinds of boats were they? Did he get paid for his troubles? Mami, Caridad and I watched from the kitchen, amazed at Jimmy’s interest and patience. He wasn’t just pretending to pay attention: He was really listening.

  “But then, you know how it goes with these stupid yanquis” my father said, beginning the most frustrating part of the story. “I was doing so much for them, for the CIA, and things were getting hot for me. Of course, I can’t say—even to this day—I can’t say what I was doing—it’s still a state secret, can you imagine?—so I asked them, I asked the CIA to get me out of Cuba, please, before the communists killed me in front of my wife and children.”

  I remember Gina just nodded at this but Jimmy beamed at him, as if everything he was saying was reasonable. “A sensible request,” he said. “After all, you’d done so much for them.” He sipped his beer.

  “Exactly, Jimmy, exactly!” my father said excitedly. He couldn’t believe he had such an appreciative audience in Cari-dad’s boyfriend. I’m sure at that moment he regretted Jimmy wasn’t dating Nena or me and on his way to being his son-in-law. “But do you know what the CIA said? They said, ‘You’re Alberto José Casas y Molina, no? You’re the guy who gets everybody out of Cuba, so get yourself out!’ Can you believe that, eh?”

  “Unbelievable,” Jimmy said, right on cue.

  According to Papi, once he was abandoned by the CIA, he managed to prepare one last boat for our family and a few friends, making elaborate plans for a midnight rendezvous at a deserted beach outside Havana. My mother was in charge of getting us to the shore, along with the bare essentials for the trip and life in the U.S.—including, of course, a sample of and the formula for my father’s cinta magnética—but, somehow, in the madness of the moment, she either lost it or forgot it, depending, again, on my father’s audience for the story and how he and Mami are getting along at the time.

  For Gina, my father just threw his hands in the air as if he wasn’t sure what had happened. For Jimmy, my father pinned our lost fortunes on my mother’s nervousness, although he tried to forgive her by adding that hers was not an unexpected response for any woman in that kind of situation and that maybe he shouldn’t have left such an awesome responsibility on her shoulders.

  “Poof! Gone!” Papi said, sucking on another beer.

  “It wasn’t meant to be, Alberto,” Jimmy said, nearly making a mistake.

  “It wasn’t meant to be? Are you crazy? Of course it was meant to be,” my father insisted. “Don’t you realize what happened?”

  Even Jimmy shook his head at this one, truly confused.

  “The CIA, Jimmy, the CIA!” my father screamed. He was standing up now, hoisting his pants with his free hand, drinking and pacing. “They stole the formula! You know what happened when I got to the United States? The first thing I see in a hardware store window in Miami? Duck tape, that’s what.”

  “Duct tape,” Jimmy corrected him softly.

  “Exactly, duck tape—cinta pata, cinta maricona—can you believe?”

  The irony is that it wasn’t Gina, but Jimmy, who faltered at the end of my father’s story. I think for Gina, who sometimes believes her phones are tapped or that the U.S. government is infiltrating her independentista meetings, a conspiracy to steal my father’s duct tape formula wasn’t all that far-fetched. That she didn’t believe my father had a damn thing to do with the development of duct tape didn’t stop her for one minute from thinking Uncle Sam could have ripped him off. I took it as a sign of Gina’s love for me that after my father told her the story, she thanked him and promised that, in solidarity with him, she’d never use duct tape again.

  But Jimmy, hard as he was trying, couldn’t really believe my father had lost the rights to duct tape due to a U.S. government scheme. It offended all of his sensibilities. Later, Caridad told me that Jimmy said he thought duct tape had been on the market long before any of us arrived in the U.S. Caridad begged him not to ever mention anything to Papi, for fear of breaking his heart even more.

  “You mean the CIA abandoned you so they could steal the formula for duct tape? The CIA is the company that makes duct tape?” Jimmy asked, aghast.

  My father nodded smugly. “You see, you young people, you know nothing,” he said, still pacing, still pulling his pants up by the waistband. This is a completely unnecessary gesture, because his pants always fit him fine, but he does it whenever he gets anxious. “Why do you think the CIA is called ‘The Company’, eh? It’s a joke, no? Of course they make the duck tape, and they make Pepsi-Cola and telephone poles and all kinds of things. Half of the products in the supermarket are made by the CIA.”

  That’s all it took to get Jimmy back on track. “That’s incredible,” he said, sitting back in his chair, enjoying the show again. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yeah, and my cinta magnética,” my father said sadly, plopping back into his chair and staring at one of Tío Raul’s more tolerable paintings hanging on our wall. “I could have been as rich as that guy,” he said, jutting his chin in the direction of the canvas, but Jimmy, understandably confused, missed the reference.

  “If only Fidel hadn’t come,” Jimmy said, “things might have been different. We’d be making duct tape in Cuba and selling it to the Americans.”

  “Yeah, if only the yanquis had not stolen my formula,” my father whispered. “If only…”

  It’s not surprising then that, regardless of whatever my father’s relationship really was with the CIA, if any, he wasn’t the one who pushed to leave Cuba. He’s more of a dreamer than a worker, and even though he’s no snob, he rather enjoyed the privilege of being a Casas y Molina in Cuba’s small society circles. He’s harmless enough that he would been able to ride out the revolution without too much trouble and, in his heart of hearts, I’m sure even he knows that.

  Frankly, we left Cuba, not because the milicianos were after my father for stealing boats, but because of my mother. Not that the revolution had much to do with her reasoning, either. For my mother, the revolution was ju
st the last straw.

  It’s not that my mother didn’t like Cuba—she did. I don’t think she’s ever been as happy as she is in those dull color pictures of her at Varadero beach, slim and loose-limbed, laughing it up with my father. There’s something very marvelously Cuban about them in those photos: My father’s in white linen pants and a guayabera, my mother’s wearing thick dark lipstick and pearl earrings. All around them, Varadero is dense with its unlikely pine trees, and the sun is so bright Mami and Papi are always squinting. In one picture, my father’s cocky with his hand on his hips, staring right at the camera, and my mother’s swooning underneath, gazing up at him as if he were the biggest star in Hollywood.

  In another picture, they’re sharing a chaise lounge under an umbrella, their legs tangled in a wildly sensual way that’s hard to believe for them. As long as I can remember, they’ve never been particularly affectionate in public, much less sexual. According to Nena, to whom my mother confides everything, my father didn’t even sleep with my mother their whole first year of marriage because, supposedly, he respected her so much; he went to brothels instead—although Patricia, a fervent Fidel supporter until a few years back, always claims that there were no brothels in Cuba in the sixties—one of the real achievements of the revolution—and that the story has to be false on that basis alone.

  At the time of these happy photographic scenes, my father didn’t have much family money left (most of it having been squandered by his father, a corrupt former government official affiliated with Batista), didn’t have a job, and didn’t have prospects beyond the cinta magnética, but my mother was sure she’d found a prize: My father, after all, is green-eyed and very light-skinned. For my mother—Xiomara Ruiz y Garcia, a café con leche mulata from Guanabacoa—marrying a guy this pale was a big deal. Her older sister, Zenaida, Patricia and Manolito’s mother, had married Tío Raúl, a brown-skinned character who’d moved them to New York with a nutty dream of becoming an artist. Since then he’d dumped Zenaida and taken off to have adventures with Fidel all over Oriente province, Costa Rica and Mexico. Their whole relationship, including the eventual divorce, was considered a horrible family disgrace. My mother was sure she could do better than that, especially with the prestigious Alberto José Casas y Molina.

  Before my mother met my father, she’d been told during a shell-throwing divination session that she’d marry the next man she met who had green eyes. She was delighted at this news because, though my mother is clearly a mixed breed—just touch the pasitas on her head—and my Abuela Olga is obviously of African descent, my mother will do just about anything to deny her real lineage. When she saw my father, sipping a cafesito at an outdoor café just outside the house of her favorite babalao, she was sure their kids would be colorless and beautiful.

  Alberto José Casas y Molina wasn’t just light-skinned though: He boasted a splendid ancestry. As we’ve always been told, we’re direct descendants of Bartolomé de Las Casas, better known in Cuban lore as “The Apostle to the Indies.” Las Casas got this name because of his alleged work protecting the island’s indigenous population from the Spaniards’ bloodlust.

  My mother always professes admiration for Las Casas’ humanitarianism, although, perhaps more importantly, I think she likes the way the whole legend around Las Casas positions the question of race between white and Indian, consigning most of the issue of blackness to silence. In fact, my brother Pucho’s real name is Bartolomé. At one time, Pucho tried to get his American friends to call him Bart, which horrified my parents. Some people did call him Bart for a while, but the neighborhood kids—mostly Appalachians, Poles and Jews—called him Pooch, which wasn’t that much different from Pucho.

  I was named Juana, I’ve been told, because my father always liked the name. All the great Cuban songs mention a Juana, he’d tell us, but we could never think of any that did, and then he’d just say, “Hey, what kind of Cubans are you anyway?” He’d make something up, a little chorus or funny verse about Juana La Cubana and how she danced in Havana and we’d all laugh. My name has its own legacies, though: A dissident sister of Fidel’s is named Juana, as was the unhappy and somewhat mad daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Spanish monarchs who set Columbus on his way to Cuba and for whom the island was originally named.

  But, Nena and I have never believed either one of us got named simply because of the way our names sounded, or for religious reasons or any of that. Nena (whose real name is Maria Victoria) and I have always believed I was named after a girl in Varadero my father liked as young man, and that she was named for a woman nicknamed Marivi who we heard from Pucho was Papi’s “regular girl” at that alleged brothel in Havana.

  Curiously, that Bartolomé de Las Casas was a Catholic priest sworn to celibacy is always left out of the family stories so how, exactly, we’re supposed to be directly related to him is a bit of a mystery, even to us. My parents usually say our bloodline dates to prior to his commitment to God, although there seems to be little—even in exile literature—to indicate Las Casas was ever married. (There is a governor Las Casas that shows up about two hundred years later in Cuban history, a rather productive but boring fellow who paved the streets of Havana and invented the concept of one-way streets, but my family has never expressed much interest in being related to him.)

  Patricia, who has traveled to Cuba to cut sugarcane with various communist brigades over the years and tried to research the story, says that the whole Bartolomé de Las Casas tale is one elaborate lie. She told us that one of the ways Las Casas “protected” the Indians was by making the first suggestion to the Spanish governor that Africans might be better suited to work in the tropics than the Indians. This, Patricia said, is what started slavery in Cuba. I still remember the look on her face when she gave us that bit of news: her eyebrow arched, a smirk barely contained on her mouth.

  Whenever Patricia spews this, my parents get hysterical, making the sign of the cross, telling her she’s been brainwashed. Wherever she got her information, they say, it’s obviously pure communist propaganda. But what really kills them is when Patricia tells them that, if indeed we’re descendants of Las Casas, chances are we’re the spawns of an illegitimate child conceived with some Indian woman he probably raped. My mother practically faints over this—not because it so tampers with the historical image of our supposed ancestor but because it would mean that, in spite of my mother’s better efforts, we’re not so white after all.

  When we were little, my mother was always after us: “Caminen siempre por la sombra”—always walk in the shade. She was terrified that too much sun would somehow reveal our real heritage, whether Indian or black.

  As it turned out, I am pretty light-skinned, and Nena got my father’s green eyes. But Nena’s actually kind of yellow-colored, with a propensity for darkness after any exposure to the sun. The truth is that Nena is more beautiful the darker and browner she gets. And my brother Pucho, with his kinky hair and full lips, obviously got my mother’s genes instead of my father’s. (To my mother’s chagrin, Patricia and Manolito, the children of her sister Zenaida and the brown-skinned Raúl, are both pale and Anglo-like, with blue veins visible just under rice-paper skin.)

  When the revolution triumphed in 1959, nothing stunned my mother more than the fact that that crazy Raúl and his black friends were riding on tanks with Fidel through the city, shooting rounds into the air and getting drunk together. When she saw him, she looked away and hid, sure she was not going to give him the satisfaction of having won this particular battle. In that instant, my mother—who’d been struggling to pass her entire life—could see that the order of things had just been altered.

  Years later, after she’d landed Alberto José Casas y Molina and we were born, her immediate goal became to get us out of Cuba, out of Latin America, out of any country where we might couple with anybody even a shade darker than us: We had to get to the United States, which was close by and chock full of frog-eyed white people such as Joe Namath and President Ford.

>   Each time Mami remembers the moment when Raúl, Fidel and his supporters waved and laughed at the multi-colored masses lining the streets of Havana on that historic New Year’s Day, she’s reborn as a counterrevolutionary.

  CHAPTER 4

  “HEY,CARI…IT’S ME,” I whisper through the door of Caridad and Jimmy’s apartment. A circle of cats are devouring a bowl full of tuna Caridad has left for them under the stairs. I’m a little cold so I hug myself and wait, looking across the street at the second floor above Polonia Furniture.

  When we first moved here shortly after coming to the U.S., we were some of the first Latino immigrants in the area (a lot of Puerto Ricans, like Gina and her family, were already here) and the Poles who’d made Logan Square their neighborhood weren’t very friendly to us. The guys who owned the furniture store would routinely shoo us away whenever we lingered too long around their windows. The owners used to live above the store: We would see work shirts and underwear strung along clotheslines inside the apartments, little babies with food smeared on their faces who’d lean perilously out the windows, and sometimes a few skinny stems growing out of old soup cans set on the sill. But that was a long time ago.

  As I wait for Caridad to open the door, I can’t help but think that those old Poles are probably wishing there were more of us Latinos from back then still in the neighborhood. At least we always bought their feeble furniture—the vinyl dinette sets, the bureaus made of pressed wood, even the framed pictures of clowns. It was because of us that they were able to make enough money to move out of the upstairs apartments and into houses of their own in the suburbs.