“Espera, wait, espera, espera … NOW!” yelled Alberto.
The copilot flipped the switch and several crates full of supplies, food, weapons, and ammunition dropped from the belly of the aircraft and floated, hanging from parachutes, toward the center of the clearing, coming down inside the open part of the V.
Alberto pulled up, bomb-bay doors in transit, and in a few minutes he was roaring over the sleepy town of Sancti Spiritus, where he turned south and headed back toward the sea. Over the water once again, Alberto felt like doing a victory roll. When he was twenty he would have done one. But with the self-confident mellowness that begins to swell in a man’s heart during the third decade of life, he had felt it was sufficient just to think about it and savor the idea in his mind. So he thought about a nice eight-point hesitation roll like the ones he had done so many times at air shows all over the island.
By the time they landed at dawn, word had been relayed by the resistance to their CIA contacts, up to Washington, and from Washington down to the secret base in Nicaragua.
“Perfect drop! Right on the nose!”
That same day the sign on the door of the bar came down and lifelong friendships began over drinks between the Cuban trainees and their American mentors.
Later Alberto learned that the instructor who had flown with him on that mission was one of the last men to die during the invasion. The American instructors were not supposed to engage in the fighting, but during the waning hours of the three-day debacle, when the Cuban exiles were hopelessly surrounded on the beach by overwhelming numbers of enemy troops, the supply ships had been sunk, and Castro’s air force ruled the air, that American instructor and several other members of the Alabama Air National Guard had climbed aboard a B-26 and headed toward Playa Girón to be with their friends.
The young Southerners flew the antique bomber into the thick of the battle in a last-ditch effort, reminiscent of the Confederate cavalry charges their ancestors made during the last days of the American Civil War: a brave, hopeless gesture, passionate and insane but full of beauty and honor. They were, of course, shot down by Castro’s fighters, but not before taking a few tanks out of commission and blowing up several gun emplacements.
Now Alberto thought about those days and about his dead friends, and he wondered if that hauntingly beautiful lady he had met the other day had been one of those resistance fighters holding flashlights and forming that V at the drop point. He liked to think she was. She had said she was from Sancti Spiritus, and Alberto had forgotten to mention he had flown that air drop. It’s amazing what age will do to you, he thought. The things you forget! Or maybe it was not age, maybe it was her eyes. He had been fascinated by her eyes, and now he realized that he had not felt this way about a woman since the death of his wife.
Alberto, you are really getting old, he thought. It has taken you three days to realize you are in love. Well, next time we’ll have something to talk about.
Next time! Suddenly he felt awkward. Why did I have to be wearing that old shirt with grease stains on it? How did I know I was going to run into such a beautiful, interesting woman? I was on my way home from the airstrip and stopped at a bar to have a drink. How was I to know? Do I have to wear a suit every day? Next time I’ll wear a suit. No, I’ll wear my new navy blazer, more sporty. She gave me her phone number. Some excuse about a function at her municipio-in-exile. Next time!
Alberto thought about flying that old B-26 at Playa Girón, and about the mysterious serenity he had felt toward the end of the battle, when he was sure he would never return, and he thought about his new love, and in the pleasant, muted light of the afternoon he followed the current toward Key Largo.
Chapter Fourteen
The old man had been playing dominoes in the shade before he walked over to the other side of the park as the ceremony began. It was a small crowd, mostly relatives and veterans. He was not a relative or a veteran. But he saw them putting up the flags and the insignia of the brigade around the open-air podium and he walked over to see.
Vivian had not noticed him standing next to her while a priest at the podium read the names of those who had died during the invasion. Vivian’s father had been one of them. He had been a paratrooper who was machine-gunned during the first wave when his parachute became tangled in the branches of a tree and left him dangling helplessly over the ciénaga or swamp of Zapata, which lies beyond the beach of Girón. Vivian was twelve when she first heard the full story from one of her father’s friends, but she was much younger when it happened.
As each name was read, the crowd answered in unison, “¡Presente!” in honor of the deceased, and each time the response was louder, building up gradually like an orchestra playing a crescendo.
When the priest had finished reading the names, he made the sign of the cross, said a prayer, and then turned on a tape recorder, which played a remarkably clear version of “El Himno de Bayamo,” the Cuban national anthem, over the loudspeakers.
The introductory trumpet flourish had just concluded and the people were beginning to sing the first stanza, which is a call to arms, “Al combate corred Bayameses…” when Vivian heard a deep groan and saw the old man who had been standing next to her fall on the grass, clutching his breast. Those nearest to him scurried around looking for a doctor in the crowd. The priest came running and knelt by the man. In the confusion they forgot to turn off the tape recorder and the martial lyrics of the national anthem continued floating over the people who by now had gathered around the dying man: “No temais una muerte gloriosa…”
“El Himno de Bayamo” finished, and as the tape machine continued to run, another martial hymn full of trumpet fanfares began to play. And the last thing the old man heard was the shrill sound of sirens mixing confusingly with the opening strains of “El Himno Invasor” before Vivian climbed up on the stage and turned off the machine.
It is always like that with us, Vivian thought as she sat in her office later that afternoon. So extreme, so final. Such exaggerated emotion, and everything always tasting of death. On both sides of the straits. “Patria o muerte,” fatherland or death. “Socialismo o muerte,” socialism or death. This or that or muerte. O muerte, o muerte, o muerte. Everything o muerte. My God! Why can’t we be a little more like Americans? Vivian thought. A little calmer, a little cooler, a little … less extreme.
Vivian, having grown up in the United States, could see it from both sides, more or less. Her ambition had taken her to the Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut, where she learned discipline and was exposed to gray skies and northern waters. But under the surface her Cubanness remained, and she was proud of it and did not hide it even if some of its aspects amazed and puzzled her when viewed from her New England perspective.
And the o muerte thing is more than just rhetoric, she thought. It is a sort of insanity. A medieval, quixotic brand of insanity. She remembered a story about some respected media personality in Cuba who was upset about something or other. She could not remember what the issue was, but that is not important or central to the story. What is central is that this media personality went on the air one day and said what was on his mind and then, as if to punctuate what he had just said, as if to let the world know how strongly he felt about it, he pulled out a gun and blew his own brains out. Right there. In the middle of a broadcast.
What people! thought Vivian. And then she felt guilty for being angry with the old man who had spoiled her father’s ceremony by having a heart attack. Poor man. It wasn’t his fault. But she was also angry with her father for going off and getting killed, leaving her behind to grow up without him in a strange country. Jumping out of an airplane into a swamp. At his age!
She was also angry with Juan, whom she had never met and who was now intruding, disturbing her orderly life. And with the other two adrift Lord knows where, and with Fidel Castro who caused it to begin with, and with Batista who caused Fidel Castro, and with the man who blew his brains out on the air, who the hell knows why. She was angry with
the whole bunch. All of them blended in her mind, the good ones and the evil ones, the innocent and the guilty. All of them men, all of them Cuban, all of them so extreme.
Vivian stood up, walked around her desk, and poured herself a cup of coffee. She had a feeling a long night was coming and she had promised Carmen she would be at the base. Well, not exactly. But she had promised her she would do everything possible and in her mind that meant staying at her station, behind her desk at the Coast Guard base. Carmen was a good friend and she owed it to her to stay at the base and keep an eye out. The hell with the men.
But even as she thought it, she knew that it was more than that. She could tell herself she was keeping vigil because she owed it to Carmen and she could curse the men and blame them, all of them everywhere, living and dead, for all the nights she had stayed up. And there was some justification in that. But she knew that it was more than duty to Carmen and it was not the fault of the men.
Away from the base, inland, away from the water and the smell of the ocean, an air of vigil hung over the city like the fragrance of a million tropical blossoms, as it had for the past thirty years. And if you were a Cuban living in Miami, there was no place you could escape from it. It would pull you out of bed before dawn and make you turn on the radio. It would keep you up late at night, listening. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Everything you did, every secret thought, every distant aspiration, was colored by that eternal vigil. Waiting for the day, waiting for the inevitable day.
This was Miami before The Fall (of Castro). Miami, la capital del Exilio, “the capital of the Exile,” el centro del destierro, the gathering place of those who were banished. And no exiliado, no desterrado, no sojourner in this sweet but alien land needed an excuse for her insomnia.
For us, thought Vivian, nothing in this place is permanent, not even the grave. Turn on the radio and some funeral home is offering a special discount on “The Plan,” if you sign up by the end of the month. The Plan, as everyone knows, provides that after The Fall your bones will be dug up and flown or floated back across the Straits—at no extra charge—to be reburied in la Patria. Like the bones of Joseph the Israelite, thought Vivian. And she imagined a flotilla of thousands of little arks filled with bones and dust floating south across the straits.
What an insane, impermanent city! How insubstantial, she thought. Everything is as liquid as a dream. A warm, balmy tropical dream where things appear out of the darkness only to vanish again in the mists. And after the dream, what remains? Nothing solid remains, she thought. Nothing that can be touched and held, only the memory of a sweet fragrance carried by the wind.
Most people, Vivian thought as she sipped her coffee, spend their lives searching vaguely for something that was lost in the gray confusion of their childhood memories. But for us, she thought, for the Cuban-Americans of our generation, the Pedro Pans, the children of the “Peter Pan” flights, for us who were plucked from our world as we slept, the children who, without warning, without preparation, were whisked from the hands of their parents by conspiratorial strangers and flown across the Straits into a strange new world; and for all the other children who, like the Peter Pans, awoke one morning on the other side of the Straits, the transition was so sudden and the loss of innocence so abrupt, that in our memories the flight has assumed the trappings of a paradisiacal expulsion. And everything beautiful and distant that tastes of Paradise relates somehow to that flight. So we keep searching and waiting. For what? she thought. For the way homeward? For the return? For the source of that lingering fragrance? We keep searching, she thought, just as our crazed Iberian ancestors searched. For what? For gold? For Eldorado? For the crystal source of an eternal spring? Or the way a man searches and a woman waits for the return of an impossible love that was lost back in the place where the courses of their lives crossed and touched gently, so gently, and then forever diverged.
It had rained briefly at sunset and it was darker now but the clouds had dispersed and through her office window Vivian could still see a red luminescence with streaks of solid purple and other, more subtle colors spreading out across the sky behind the city and reflecting off the waters of the bay.
“I brought some dinner,” said Carmen as she walked into Vivian’s office.
“Thank you. You didn’t have to go to the trouble, but I appreciate it.”
Carmen came in carrying a large paper bag out of which she pulled three rectangular aluminum containers with cardboard tops. There were a couple of palomilla steaks sprinkled with lime juice and covered with sauteed onions in one, the second was filled with white rice, and the third had platanos maduros fritos, sweet fried plantains, and there were black beans in a pint-sized Styrofoam container. She also brought paper plates, paper napkins, utensils, and canned soft drinks, all of which she laid out neatly on Vivian’s desk.
The two women ate quietly. After they finished they remained silent for a long time, each one with her own thoughts. Then Carmen’s face became troubled as she felt guilt, like an unpleasant bile surging inside her, darkening her eyes. “It’s all my fault,” she said, “this whole thing.”
“How can you say that?”
“If I hadn’t defected, if I had stayed, if I had waited, none of this would have happened.”
“They did what they wanted to do. They did what they had to do. You can’t blame yourself for such a thing,” said Vivian.
“But it is my fault. Juan would have never left if I had stayed. And now it is almost over. The way things are going, Communism crumbling around the world, soon it will be over, behind us like a bad dream. I should have stayed and held on a little longer.”
“You’re becoming like the rest of the Cubans in Miami, Carmen. The infection is getting to you. According to them, it’s been almost over every evening around this time for thirty years.”
“Them? Aren’t you one of them?” Carmen asked.
“A veces, sometimes. You just got here—you don’t know what it’s like every Noche Buena, every Christmas Eve, the same toast: ‘Next year in Havana! Next year in Havana! Next year in Havana!’ Every New Year’s: ‘¡Volveremos! We shall return!’ Volveremos, volveremos, volveremos. All the time, everywhere, all your life: volveremos. And every day la Corriente, the Stream, brings people across the Straits in flimsy little rafts, and I’m responsible for picking them up, for rescuing them—I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to say that. It just came out.”
“It’s okay,” said Carmen.
“A veces,” Vivian continued, “sometimes I have to get away and pretend.”
“Pretend what?”
“Pretend that I’m American. Pretend to live a normal life. I go to New Hampshire, to the White Mountains, among the birches away from palm trees, and in the little towns no one talks about Cuba, no one thinks about Cuba. It’s just a little speck. Come back to Miami and Cuba looms huge, hanging over the city, and it’s ‘¡Volveremos! ¡Volveremos!’ But of course we can never truly return.”
“Why didn’t you stay in New England after you graduated? Why did you come back to Miami?”
“¿Qué iba a hacer alla arriba? What was I going to do up there? It’s not my home. This crazy place is. ¿Qué iba a hacer? This is what I have to do. Besides, there was great pride in coming back after the academy.”
Vivian remembered arriving in Miami as a Pedro Pan, a Peter Pan, which is what they called the children who were sent ahead to the United States by their parents in the early sixties through a semi-clandestine, visa-waiver operation run by the Catholic Diocese of Miami in conjunction with the U.S. State Department and inside contacts in Cuba. That was back when the rules of the revolution were changing every day. Parents were afraid Castro would send their children to Russia if war came and they would lose them forever to that distant, sunless place. Strange, sad things were happening in Cuba. The Communists were using schoolchildren to snitch on their parents, to sniff out “counterrevolutionaries.” Many people were arrested because of an unguarded comment at dinner. There were ru
mors of war, of an American invasion. People whispered, “The Americans won’t allow a Russian base ninety miles away. Nunca, never. It’ll never happen. Better send the children to Florida where they’ll be safe before Castro sends them to Russia. Then, if an invasion comes—and you know it will—when Cuba is liberated we’ll be reunited. If Castro sends them to Russia, when the war comes, like the Communists are saying, we’ll never see them again.” There was a sense of electricity, a feeling like there is when a great storm is about to hit, when the sky darkens and the air becomes charged and there is a strong smell of rain.
And one day in 1961, Vivian, age seven, landed alone at Miami International Airport holding a small suitcase in one hand and a piece of paper in the other. The piece of paper said “Camp Matecumbe.” An hour later she was on a bus headed to Upper Matecumbe Key, south of Key Largo.
In Cuba the night before, dinner had been very sad and quiet. After dinner her father and mother had tucked her in bed with tears in their eyes, saying things like “We just want you to be safe,” and “The nuns will take good care of you,” and “We’ll join you real soon.”
Before turning out the light, her father came back and held her and said, “Remember, the most important thing is to be brave. No matter what happens the rest of your life, you must be brave.”
A month later her father escaped in a small boat. The sea was rough the night he left, and from the shore they could see the lights of the heavily armed gunboats prowling back and forth, back and forth. Her mother panicked at the last moment and refused to get on the boat. That winter Vivian spent a few weeks with her father in Miami before he left for Nicaragua to join the invasion brigade, and then she was alone again and stayed that way.
So Vivian told Carmen about these things because they were in her heart and because she thought they might distract Carmen and get her mind off Juan. But they did not, of course, and Carmen continued:
“Juan would have stayed. He was not political.”
The Lonely Crossing of Juan Cabrera Page 10
