“I like the red, too,” Vincent said. He was wide-eyed as he watched the two trainers bring the cocks into the middle of the ring and poke them at each other, getting them pissed and in a murderous rage.
Vincent was an executive with Havana’s Tropical Paradise Casino. I didn’t know exactly what his title was, or even exactly what his function was. Someone told me it was his job to kill people who cost the casino money, whatever that meant. But in Havana, when you were told that someone was a killer, you just nodded your head, same as if you’d been told they go to church on Sunday. Especially when it was so logical and reasonable. Havana’s casinos were mob owned, mostly the New York Italian crowd with a Jew named Meyer Lansky pulling the strings. Murder just went with the territory.
Basically, I had come to the cockfight because Jose asked me to and Vincent came along because he wanted to talk to me. Jose wanted his payoff, and “winning” it at a cockfight was as good a ploy as any, and Vincent wanted to sell me a piece of a mob-owned casino.
Havana was quite a town. Where else could you bribe a public official and do business with a mobster, all at the same blood sport?
“There’s not much in life as exciting and satisfying as owning a casino,” Vincent told me as we rode over in my chauffeur-driven Cadillac. Detroit cranked out their new models months before the calendar year, and I had a 1959 Eldorado Biarritz shipped over, hot off the assembly line. A big car was mucho status in Cuba, and there was nothing bigger than this new Cad that had enough chrome to plate a battleship and fins you could rollerskate on. The car had white leather seats that electrically adjusted six ways, a white convertible top, double headlights with double utility lights underneath. Only ninety-nine of these babies came with bucket seats, and mine was one of them. It packed a V8 with 390 horses and sat on big fat whitewalls. The paint was metallic Persian Sand.
I grew up believing that men loved power and women loved soft things, but Havana proved me dead wrong. Women were the power lovers. It was the female of the species who drove men to flex their muscles and rev their engines. If there ever was a pussy mobile, the kind of heap that attracted women in and their clothes off, it was this beautiful chunk of metal from Detroit.
* * *
I lit a cigar for Vincent—not one of my own, which more often than not were counterfeits of fine, hand-rolled brand name smokes, but a Montecristo that was made specially for me and carried my company name, Cutter, Ltd., and logo, the head of a leaping viper. I spent so much of my time worrying about the vipers in the colony, I decided to keep one around. Maybe it would make people afraid of screwing with me.
Vincent nodded at the Totalmente a mano, “handmade”, statement on the label and the well-veined, even textured wrapper.
There were three parts to a cigar—the filler in a superior cigar was the long leaf stuff in the center, the binder was the first layer holding the filler together, and the wrapper was the crème de la crème—the outer wrap that you saw with your eyes and accounted for over half the taste.
Vincent gave me his seal of approval. “Good earthy aroma, has a hint of coffee and honeyed tones, good brand,” he said.
“Actually, these are made especially for me. They’re not really hand rolled, but rolled between the thighs of virgins.”
“No shit.” He looked at the cigar with renewed respect. “Get me some boxes of these. The boys back in New York will get a kick out of sucking on ’em.”
He went on philosophizing about gambling. “There’s only one thing I can think of that equals the thrill of handling huge amounts of pure cash, tens, twenties, even ones and quarters. You ever seen how much quarters add up to? You know, they don’t even bother counting change, no shit, they just weigh it. But, like I was saying, there’s only one thing that comes close to that kind of excitement and satisfaction, and that’s being a pimp with a first-class stable of babes.”
“A pimp?”
“Can you imagine what it must be like to come up to babes and just rip open their blouses and feel their boobs anytime you liked, or pull down their panties and rub their cunts until they’re juicy and bend them over a table and hump them doggy style? Then send them out to fuck and rob some dumb-ass john and pocket every dollar their sorry asses earn?”
Yeah, Vincent and Jose were a couple of real intellectual types. The kind you find in the south Bronx at construction sites and along the Brooklyn docks. I had to wonder sometimes why I got along so well with them.
The arena had that steamy, stinky jockstrap smell of a dressing room after a sports match. Along with the damp-sour sports smell was the acrid odor of cheap cigar and cigarette smoke, enough to give a nonsmoker in the place black lung disease—the whole damn place was clouded by smoke. You didn’t have to light up, just take a deep breath in and you could blow out smoke rings.
It was my night out with “the boys,” a couple guys I would never have associated with except for business purposes. Back at my hotel, cooling their spiked heels and net stockings in the lounge, were four Havana putas, a set of twins apiece for Jose and Vincent, part of the payoff to the government official for turning his head when I violated the rules and to the gangster for offering to let me in on a piece of a casino. The twins were a nice touch, I thought. My reputation in the city was of a can-do guy who pays his debts. They were even more interesting because Jose was a switch-hitter—naturally his set were boy-girl fraternal twins.
Let me tell you, there were no whores like Havana whores. In my opinion, the street girls of Havana were unmatched in spicy sex appeal. There was something about the women of Havana that made them great sluts. In most places, it was the losers who turned to prostitution—drug addicts, women with no self-respect, abused women. But in Havana, the babes were first cabin, all of them, maybe because they knew they were hot stuff. Even the male prostitutes had great asses, which I found out third-hand—occasionally I had to pay off a guy who, like Jose, preferred to get his action through the back door.
It was no skin off my nose, as my American friends would say. Live and let live, just make sure you get your share of the take.
“There are two ways they prepare the spurs on the cocks,” Jose said, almost overwhelmed by the anticipation of seeing blood.
“Spurs?”
“Bony growths at the back of their legs. Some birds get their spurs cut off and the owner attaches a razor to it, other types fight Caribbean-style, with the bony spur sharpened until it can cut like a razor.”
As he spoke, the trainers in the ring were agitating the birds, getting ready for the match, poking them at each other, teasing until the birds were wild-eyed and literally foaming at the beak to start drawing blood.
“They’re not ordinary chickens, you know,” Vincent, the pimp expert, said. “Fighting cocks are bred, cross-bred and bred again, until they’re large birds with the speed and aggression necessary to win. It’s a real science to breed the little fuckers. But you gotta have some street smarts to choose the right birds.” The casino man tapped his temple. “Just like boxers, it’s all up here. You either think you’re a winner or you lose. You can’t win unless you’re all psyched out with how great you are. It’s the same with the cocks; some of them think they’re winners. It’s the cock that believes it’s the meanest and the toughest that’s gonna win.”
Jose spoke to a man standing in the aisle below us. He muttered some particularly foul Spanish after they finished.
“There’s a rumor that one of the birds has poison on its spikes. That’s what the bastardos do, they cheat so any scratch will kill their opponent’s bird.”
“Did you find out which bird has the poison?” I asked, not really caring. It sounded like a rumor, the same sort of thing you hear about boxers having eye irritation on their gloves.
“No one knows. I wish I did, I’d bet on it.”
“Uh, are there rules like the Marquis of Queensbury stuff they have in boxing?” I asked.
“Naturalamente,” Jose said. “If they go down for the count
, or if they run away or die, they lose.”
“You have to understand that these birds are serious warriors,” the casino man said. “They’re like them gladiators that used to fight to the death. These birds even have to fast for two days before their big fight, kept all that time in darkness and isolation. And you know the most important thing they must avoid?”
“Sex?” I asked facetiously, taking a wild guess.
“Correcto!” Jose said. “Si, amigo, you know the routine. No sex, not even a peck before a match. Reduces their strength. And just before the match, they bring in a case of hens and tempt the cock with it. When he gets it up, they pull the hens away to really piss the cock off.”
“Watch their moves closely,” Vincent said, “you’ll see that the winners are true artists, martial artists of the jujitsu kind. If you held your hand in front of one of these killers, they would slice it to ribbons in seconds. I knew a guy once, when I was a kid in the Bronx, who could handle a shiv that way. He used to slice the neck of pigeons, not all the way through, just so they’d run around spraying blood until they fell.”
Listening to the two foaming at the mouth at the idea of a couple chickens shredding each other with sharp claws and razor blades made me feel like I had fallen into the same hole Alice had—but Havana was a long way from Wonderland.
It had been three years since I left British Honduras on the heels of a hurricane and an even greater tempest in my personal life. The years swept by like the one hundred and fifty-mile-per-hour winds of the hurricane. I came to Havana, the heart of the world of rum, sugarcane and cigars—and beautiful women—to establish the Garcia’s Widow brand as a premium rum, taking its place among the best in the world. Other than an occasional buy or sale of a plantation, I stayed away from growing and processing sugarcane—hell, half of Cuba was involved in growing the cane. Instead, I let others grow it and bought the molasses to make rum.
I had to move my operation from Corozal to Havana to keep it growing. It wasn’t just that Cuba was the center of the Caribbean rum world, but Corozal was out of the way, with no port, and too many restrictions. And when it became necessary to skirt a few rules and regulations, it was easier to bribe a Cuban official than a British one. Mordida, “the bite,” a payment to a public official, was the rule of law in Mexico and the Caribbean. Unlike Anglo countries like Britain and America, the passage of money to a public official was not considered a bribe, or something immoral to give or receive. Rather, it was considered a reward for an official to do their job. And it wasn’t possible to do business in the Caribbean and stay strictly on the up-and-up without it. Everybody was on the take or making the payments.
Bottom line, I had needed to get out of the colony and into the world. Corozal was no place for a young man. And no place for anyone who wanted more of a piece of the world than jungle and swamps.
Tonight I was working both ends against the middle. I had brought the two men to the cock fight not only to stroke them—yeah, I was picking up the bill even if they lost money betting—but more to grind my own axe.
My real objective in attending the cock fight was in the VIP box a third of the way across the arena. There were two men in the box I wanted to meet. One of them, Ramfis Trujillo, the son of General Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, was my main objective.
There were two vicious, rotten, corrupt murderous bastards of dictators in the Caribbean: Batista, who treated Cuba like the personal fief of a robber baron, was the bad man in Havana. The other dictator, General Trujillo, was just as much of a murderous, ruthless bastard. He had been running the Dominican Republic, a country a couple hundred miles east of Cuba, for three decades. And spilled more blood every year than the world series of cockfighting.
The other man in the VIP box I wanted to meet was Porfirio Rubirosa. He was technically Trujillo’s ambassador to Cuba, but in reality was the dictator’s goodwill ambassador to anywhere Trujillo wanted to send him. Rubi, as he was called, was an international celebrity. He was world famous as a lover, jet-setter and polo player. In a sense, he put the Dominican Republic name more on the map than cartographers.
The much-married playboy had wed two beautiful French actresses, and two of the richest women in the world—Doris Duke, a tobacco heiress, and Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress. Both heiresses were immensely wealthy. They showered him with millions, not to mention his first marriage was to Trujillo’s own daughter, Flor de Oro, “Flower of Gold.”
The marriage to Flor de Oro created something of a play on names since Rubirosa meant “red rose.” After she married Rubi, Flor’s name became Flower of Gold Red Rose.
A woman high in Havana society confided in me that Rubi had a cock a foot long and that it operated like a jackhammer. She admitted that she got the description through double-or triple-hearsay.
My suspicion was that his dick size was wishful thinking by sex-starved women. Besides, the guy’s charm would be more important to a woman than the size of his cock, especially to women who had all the money in the world to buy male meat. I don’t think his secret was in his pants, but in the fact that he knew how to wine and dine a woman, how to touch a woman’s heart—he came across as one part innocent schoolboy and one part Latin lover.
I didn’t care about his male parts or his charms, but I did want to connect with him for my own reasons. Like I said, I had my own axe to grind.
The casino man nudged me when he saw me looking at the Dominican Republic group.
“Trujillo sent his son to show support for his pal Batista because we Americans have abandoned Havana. Batista says the Americanos are hypocrites and bastardos for refusing to ship him more guns to kill his people with. He’s right. When he was killing peasants and winning the war, it was carte blanche for military aid from us folk. Hell, he was an American hero, John Wayne and apple pie, as long as he was bringing home the bacon. It’s only now when he’s killing peasants and losing the war that Eisenhower and his State Department people have gotten a dose of morality.”
The man spoke quietly so Jose wouldn’t hear him. Jose was a government official and talking defeat in Cuba was a no-no, even though the current political situation was about as promising for Batista as it was for the Roman emperor when the barbarians were at the gates of Rome with battering rams. Every day the political—and military—situation in Cuba deteriorated. There was violence on the streets, attacks against public officials and businessmen, ambushes on the roads getting closer and closer to the metropolitan areas.
Half of Havana looked wound up and ready to explode; the other half was partying and fucking like there was no tomorrow—and it was getting to look like they had the right idea.
All the commotion was caused by a young, small-time lawyer named Fidel Castro. He had a ragtag army of a few hundred hungry guerrillas who were playing hell with Batista’s well-equipped professional army. Who the hell would have thought that some guy without real military training could take on a professional army—and beat it? Castro was the illegitimate son of a sugarcane farmer, one of five kids by the farmer’s cook. Not a real auspicious beginning for someone who wants to run the country.
Five years ago, on July 26, 1953, Castro, a twenty-seven-year-old Cuban attorney no one had ever heard of, led an almost-suicidal attack against a Batista army unit, probably planning on getting martyred for his commie cause, was arrested, jailed, sentenced to fifteen years and later released in a political amnesty.
When he got out of jail, he formed a revolutionary group called the Twenty-sixth of July movement. In 1956, Castro and about eighty men of the movement crammed into a small fishing vessel, the Granma, and “invaded” Cuba. Everything went wrong. They were ambushed by Batista’s army and only about nine or ten of them escaped, including Castro and a wounded comrade named Che Guevara.
Fleeing the coast, they got into the mountains and hid—but they didn’t quit. From the mountains, they continued to fight, slowly building up an army. And others joined in the fight against Ba
tista. In March 1957, a group calling themselves the Revolutionary Directorate shot their way into the presidential palace and almost managed to kill Batista before they were gunned down.
The writing on the wall about the regime had been getting clearer and bloodier. Just a few months earlier, a general strike occurred. Since then, Batista’s forces failed to suppress two major rebel offensives. Recently Batista began an assault on Castro’s stronghold in the Sierra Maestra. More than ten thousand government soldiers failed to dislodge Castro’s ragtag army during the Battle of Jigue. Now we’d heard that this rebel army had moved out of its mountain sanctuary and onto the plains, pushing the government troops back.
But no one talked defeat openly—Batista’s men would shoot you on the spot. Anyone with a loaded gun was judge-jury-executioner.
It was the disintegration of the regime that got me interested in the people in the VIP box. I’d experienced one commie regime and I wasn’t planning on dealing with another one. There was talk of American businessmen in town bragging that they were buying up companies at fire-sale prices, confident they would be able to deal with the new regime if—when—Batista fell.
When I heard people opining that they could deal with revolutionary hotheads like this guy Castro, I’m reminded of the fact that on at least a couple of occasions, Castro threw down his life for the cause, ready to be martyred. He wasn’t the kind of guy I could talk business with. Especially in the hot, idealistic stage when revolutionary hotheads would be shooting fat cats like me.
It was time to abandon ship, and I needed a lifeboat.
34
I took another look at the people in the VIP box, sizing them up.
The women in the box weren’t Havana whores. Attractive, but not sluts, they struck me as Ramfis’s and Rubi’s hometown party girls rather than strange stuff picked up in Havana. One of them caught my eye and kept me tuning in. She wasn’t the best looking or the best stacked—in fact I took her to be the younger sister of a woman hanging onto Ramfis—but there was something about her that captured my attention.
The Betrayers Page 19
