Caribbean (130 page)

“Something she said at lunch. Money and Miami glitter aren’t the biggest things in her life, believe me.”

“But what could we offer Estéfano?” and she said: “He could easily become a doctor in our medical system. He has both his old Cuban licenses and his new American ones, and his experience would be welcome.”

“But would he give up his good life in Miami?”

“Yes, he would. And so would Caterina, that I know for sure. She misses me and the rest of her family.”

In the discussions that night, and in the nights that followed, the Miami family never once considered that
they
should move to Cuba, nor did the Cuban Calderóns consider the possibility that
they
should move to America; but that the family ought to be united, one way or another, all agreed.

It started as a trick devised by Plácida to remind the Miami Calderons of their rich Cuban heritage, but it became a day of haunting, even obsessive, memories. “Let’s take a look at what our family really was,” she said one evening, and when the others agreed, with even Roberto saying: “I’ll take a day off from headquarters,” it was planned that the two couples would leave La Habana at dawn the next day and drive well west toward the historic Calderón coffee plantation called Molino de Flores, the Mill of Flowers.

The Miami Calderons had visited the old site once or twice before the revolution, but had forgotten both its majesty and its honored place in Cuban history. They were startled when they saw the vast ruins of the main house, which must have been glorious back in the 1840s when famous travelers from all over the world visited it. “It’s large enough,” Estéfano exclaimed, “to hide a football field.” The series of seven majestic stone arches, each three stories high, were awesome even though some of the walls nearby had begun to crumble. A solemn grandeur clothed the place, and the Miami pair could believe it when Plácida said: “Sometimes four entire Calderón families lived here at the same time, which meant perhaps forty or fifty people inside the walls.”

When they left the mighty ruins, as classically balanced in all façades as those of any French château, they wandered down to one of the glories of the old place: a series of six cisterns so huge that they could provide water for the entire coffee operation. Roberto said: “When I was a boy Father told me that one torrential rain during a summer hurricane would fill all the cisterns in an afternoon.” When Caterina started to enter one of the giants he warned: “Bats nesting in there!” and she said: “They don’t fly in daylight,” but as soon as she entered the cistern she beat a hasty, laughing retreat: “They sure fly in dark caves!” and out came a whole flock of the creatures.

“There it is,” Plácida said, pointing to a construction of some kind on a high hill west of the cisterns. “That’s where it happened,” and when they had climbed to a new level they saw the great, brooding place which on two successive days had played a crucial role in Cuban history.

Now the four later-day Calderóns faced remnants of an iron fence that had once enclosed a stupendous area in which, as Plácida said: “They played their game of life and death.” This was the famous
barracón
of Molino de Flores, the prison enclosure in which slaves were domiciled for more than half a century after their fellows
had been given freedom in the British islands, thirty agonizing years after slaves were freed in the United States. Here, within this enclosure, guarded by a massive front gate still standing, more than eight hundred Calderón slaves had lived at one time in conditions so terrible that in 1884, while the Spanish governors of Cuba were still arguing that freedom for slaves would mean the death of Cuba, the slaves in this
barracón
finally decided to rebel.

“All eight hundred of them,” Plácida said, “came surging at this one gate that held them prisoner. But up in that tower”—and everyone looked at the sinister gun tower rising beside the formidable iron gate—“waited six of our men, each with four rifles, and slaves to reload them. As the rebels down here started toward the gate, the men up there fired right into their faces … gun after gun … each reloaded many times … constant gunfire until more than three dozen slaves lay slaughtered right where we stand.”

“I never heard such a story,” Caterina protested, but Roberto defended his wife: “After Castro brought us freedom, books were written. Old memories were recalled. In 1884, two years before the general end of Cuban slavery, our slaves ended theirs right here.”

“But you said they were driven back … by gunfire from up there,” and all stared at the malevolent tower, each cut stone still in place.

“Yes, that night they were killed. But in the morning the hero of our family, a young dreamer named Elizondo, who had taken no part in repelling them, startled everyone by coming here from the great house, climbing that tower, and staring down at the bodies still lying there, for the other slaves knew that if they approached the gate, they too would be shot. He kept staring for more than an hour, speaking to no one.”

“What did he do?” Caterina asked, and her sister said very slowly and with obvious pride: “He climbed down from the tower, called for the chief guard who lived in the room over there, and said: ‘Hand me your keys,’ and when he had them he went to the gate, unlocked it, threw it open, and shouted to the slaves who were still afraid to approach the gates: ‘You are slaves no more. You have earned your freedom. Come bury your dead!’ And he strode away, leaving the gate of the
barracón
ajar. After that morning it was never locked again.”

“Two years later,” Roberto said, “all Cuba followed his example, but Elizondo paid a terrible price for his leadership. His bold action branded him a traitor to Spain, so that when trouble followed in the
years prior to the big revolution of 1898, the one the
norteamericanos
became involved in, he was shot by Spanish officers who questioned his loyalty.”

The second family spot to which Plácida led them was one with happier memories, for she took them back to an area which had served at the turn of the century as a rural retreat for wealthy families who found the sweltering heat of La Habana insufferable. El Cerro it was called, The Hill, because of the eminence on which it stood, and along its one thoroughfare had stretched some two miles of the most splendid summer homes the Caribbean could provide. Sometimes a dozen mansions stood cheek by jowl along one side of the road, facing fifteen, equally grand, on the other side, and each of the twenty-seven would be fronted by seven or eight or nine of the most handsome marble pillars imaginable. Travelers came from all parts of La Habana to see what a poet had called “the forest of marble trees protecting the hiding places of the great.” One visitor from Spain, after riding past the line of mansions, said: “I care not who owns the sugar mills if I can have the monopoly of selling the pillars for their little palaces.”

As young people, the present Calderóns had known El Cerro in the years when it was about to be abandoned, and they had been aware, even then, that some of the mansions had begun to decay, but only now did they realize how widespread the devastation had become. “Oh my God!” Plácida cried. “The Count of Zaragón would be appalled! Look at those two lions he was so proud of.” There stood the lions which had once proclaimed his nobility, heads off, feet chipped and scarred, while the once fabulous house they were supposed to protect lay in ruins behind them.

“Oh! The Pérez Espinals! We played there. Look! The walls are collapsing!” And then Caterina pointed to where a mansion, once so stately, so filled with summer voices, had vanished, and the destruction was so great that she asked nervously: “What will we see when we reach our swans?” And she almost dreaded to approach the place once owned by the Calderóns. But Roberto, from his position at the wheel of their auto, reminded them: “Look at how many pillars are still standing! There’s a lot left to this street,” and he was right, for a stranger driving slowly down it would see hundreds upon hundreds
of the noble marble pillars still standing in almost military array, still trying to guard houses, some of which had disappeared behind them.

At one set of ten particularly handsome pillars, Roberto halted the car and explained: “Even before the revolution of 1959, owners realized they could no longer afford to maintain these mansions, and since no one else had the money to take them over, they were left to go to ruin. Where one distinguished family used to live, now eighteen or twenty entire families crowded in, paid no rent, and allowed everything to go to hell. Look at them!” and where the houses still remained intact, Caterina and her husband could see evidence that many families had moved in as squatters and were tearing the few remains apart. But before anyone could comment, Plácida cried: “Our swans!” and there, on the right-hand side of the splendid old road, stood one of its more remarkable mansions, walls still good, pillars intact.

What made this place memorable was that between the pillars and around the entire base of the porch, stood wing-to-wing a collection of forty-eight cast-iron swans, each about three feet high, only a few inches wide but designed and painted in such a manner as to create an explosion in the eye. Each swan stood icily erect, wings folded, head and long beak pointed straight down and kept close to the body; in this posture they looked like handsome pencils. Each was painted in three colors: gold for the legs, stark white for the head and body, a brilliant red for the long beak.

That alone would have made the swans unforgettable, but around the legs of each bird, making three complete circuits, came crawling upward a deadly serpent painted an ominous black and so positioned that its lethal head, also painted red, was poised only a few inches below the beak of the swan. Thus the swans were engaged in forty-eight deadly battles with the serpents, and no one who saw this chain of engagements engulfing him from all sides could ever forget it.

“
Olé
for our swans!” Plácida cried as the Calderóns left the car to renew their acquaintanceship with their loyal birds. “Not one serpent has ever made its way into our mansion,” Roberto boasted as he patted the down-cocked head of a swan. “Faithful to the death, but they couldn’t protect the place from this,” and he pointed to the area behind the pillars and the porch. There the Calderóns saw the door hanging limp from its hinges, the grand stairway in ruins, the interior doors behind which families in untold numbers now lived, the whole tragic affair which must soon collapse like its sister mansions along
the way. Plácida, patting the swans she had loved so dearly as a child, whispered: “You served us so much better than we served you,” and she hurried to the car, where she sat head down like her swans, unwilling to look any further at the ruin which had overtaken her childhood.

Perhaps it was because Roberto Calderón had lived for the past twenty-nine years under a dictatorship, but he was the first to detect that wherever he and his brother-in-law went they were being followed at a respectable distance by at least one car and sometimes two whose occupants were apparently spying on them, and this became so irritating that one morning as they were being trailed into La Habana he checked his Russian car to see if it had been obviously bugged, then asked: “Estéfano, are you here under secret orders? Or anything like that?”

“No! Why do you ask?” and his cousin replied: “Because that first car back there is from the office of your American representative, and the one behind him, unless I’m mistaken, is from our police.” When they reached La Habana, the trailing cars followed until the Calderóns parked and walked to Roberto’s office.

On their drive home they were again followed, but this time only by the police car, and this experience, repeated on subsequent days, encouraged the Calderóns to ventilate the questions which seemed to obsess all Miami Cubanos: “Tell us, Roberto, what’s the state of civil liberties on this island?” and Roberto said quickly and with apparent conviction: “Exactly the same as in the States. We have courts and fine lawyers, newspapers, public debate. This is a free land.”

But Estéfano felt that he must, at this point, reveal his true feelings about Cuba and its communist leadership: “No matter what you say, Roberto, to me, Castro will always be a monster and his movement a retreat from human decency. But I see the land of Cuba and people like you two as the permanent representatives of the island, so I do think that some kind of rapprochement must be engineered. I want to see the day when I can fly openly to La Habana and you can fly with me back to the States.”

“You mean … to emigrate?” Roberto spoke with such strong accents of rejection that his cousin, realizing that this was not the proper time to pursue that delicate matter, made a hasty denial: “Oh no! I meant free travel back and forth,” and when he uttered the magical
words for which so many of the world’s people yearn—“free travel”—each Calderón visualized what a rich experience it could be to journey easily and without visas between their lovely twin cities, Miami and La Habana.

Finally Estéfano said: “I do believe that if you Cubanos could see the benefits of democracy as they exist for all Cubanos in Miami, you’d change your policies down here.” Roberto and his wife just laughed, and Plácida made what was for her an uncharacteristic political observation: “We think that one of these days the rest of the Caribbean will follow our route to strong socialist government. We feel sure Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo will join us, and then probably most of the rest. Jamaica almost did, some years ago.”