Cuba and the Night (26 page)

“You are wrong, my friend. That isn’t the problem. What Cubans have isn’t patience. It’s a lack of something—call it balls.” He looked around. “Hey, you got a McDonald’s hidden away in here? You got a hamburger in this car? How about we stop and eat?” He started foraging under the floor mats.

It was horrible to see, more horrible in its way than the kids in East Africa or the Sahel: the hunger had made him desperate, craven, and instead of just a kind of slow withering and silence, there was this terrible speeding up, and this chatter, like the feverish death throes of some animal. Toothless Faust was grinning as he whored for bread.

“Give me the McDonald’s,” he shouted. He was losing it. “Give me some food. Faust needs food. Faust hasn’t eaten anything today!”

I turned the car round and headed back to town.

“Look, my friend,” he began again as we passed some buildings. “Look at the apartments. They aren’t homes. They aren’t houses. They are carton boxes. That’s what they’ve given us. Shit and then more shit. When do we see a black in power? When was the last time we saw a black with any power?”

I stopped the car where I was, and opened the door to let him out. “The ride ends here,
Señor,”
I said, and gave him a couple of dollars. He grabbed at them hungrily, and opened up his little transistor, and took out the batteries, and stashed the money away in the battery compartment.

“Okay, my friend,” he said. “I’ll see you later. When the shooting starts, I’ll meet you under the bed.” And then, weaving crazily, he veered off into the distance.

I got back into town in time to shoot the girls, and then, in the long twilight, I picked up Hugo and drove up to the Las Américas, to satisfy anyone who was watching us. It was Mad Night that night (“Here you will have chance to Sing, Dance, Jump, Cry Out,” said the notice on the bulletin board), and there were some old ads—maybe they’d been put up only yesterday—for Happy Hour and Blind Night (“with your Accustomed Participation”). Blind Night seemed pretty much the story every night in Cuba.

After we’d filled out all the forms, and left the key in an envelope for José, sweetened by ten bucks for the guy at the desk, we followed José’s directions to his father’s house, a few blocks away, on Avenida de los Libertadores. We parked around the corner, as he’d told us to do, and then followed the brass plaques till we came to the door: the same as all the others, an ancient Spanish-style numeral by a bell that didn’t work, a door that had lost its paint. Inside, one big dark room, a couple of icons on the wall, and a small passage-way, leading through a courtyard past a series of rooms.

“Señor Cruz?”

“Great to see you,” said the muscular old man, shirtless, who greeted us at the entrance, his close-cropped hair gray under his cap, his body still sturdy and firm. “My son told me you were coming. Hey, Luis.” He turned and shouted back into the interior. “Run along to Raúl and see what you can get in the way of rum. Maybe we’ll have a party tonight. I’ll tell Pastor to rustle up a pig.”

The man spoke Spanish to his sons; to us he spoke the kind of English I’d only heard in sitcoms, a kind of jaunty, Rotary Club English that came straight out of “I Love Lucy.”

“Here, come and see the palace,” he said, and he led us out into the courtyard and past the drab and darkened rooms. Inside the first
of them, a pudgy boy all in white was methodically arranging offerings around a kind of altar. “You see,” said the old man, in a low voice, “Pastor has gone the voodoo way. He knows I don’t like it, but what can I do? You’ve got to have something to believe in when things are hard. So he talks about it to his mother. I don’t like this voodoo thing, but for him, that’s where the hope is.”

He led us back into the main room, and Hugo sat in one corner of the sofa, I in the other, checking it all out for light. “Here, let me get you guys some beer,” he said, and pulled a few cans out of the freezer. He handed us a couple, then sat back in his rocking chair and popped open his Labatt.

“I guess José has told you my story. You probably heard more stories in this town than you could read in the
Reader’s Digest
. Enough stories to fill a book. Mine’s not so different. Used to work with the Yankees on the base over there: listen to the Dodgers on the radio; catch some shows on TV; just havin’ a good time. Then one day my commander says to me, ‘Hey, Peter. Give me some guns.’ So I do, and he says, ‘I’ve given them to the guys up there in the mountains.’ And a few days later—maybe a couple of weeks—I get this message, ‘You better join us.’ My mother says to me, ‘Son, don’t join them. It’s only trouble.’ But what do I know? I’m twenty-five years old, it sounds like an adventure.”

Hugo was sitting spellbound; I was getting restless.

“So anyway, I go up there, work with Fidel, grow a beard, train with a gun: the whole thing. Then, when they take Havana, one of the guys say to me, ‘You’re a captain now, you can have anything you want. What’ll it be?’ They give me a job, high up, runnin’ everything, tell me I can take any car I want, any girl from the cabarets too, and pretty soon I’m findin’ that it isn’t so much fun anymore, not like in the mountains. Like with a girl, y’know? When you’re after her, everything is romantic and exciting, and you’re always thinkin’ of the girl. Then you get her and—kerboom: it’s back to the same old routine.

“I was young then, like I say, but I could see where things were headin’. They give me a big house in Miramar, anything I want, any position in the government, any food and drink. And after a while I say, ‘No, sir. I’m goin’ back to Oriente, where I can live in peace.’

“That’s the way for me now. Just keep quiet, keep your head low, don’t talk back to no one, don’t ask for nothin’.”

“Till what happens?”

“Till you die, I guess. Or he does.” He laughed. “See, I can talk to you. With you guys, I can say anything—it’s like a vacation for me, speaking English. José tell you I was born in Jamaica? Never spoke a word of Spanish till I was fifteen. Now I never speak a word of English. Never speak a word of truth, either. ’Cause maybe one day I’m mad, and I say something to the wife, and she doesn’t like it and she tells her sister, and the sister tells her husband, whose brother’s in the Party, and next thing you know, there’s a knock on my door. ‘Mr. Cruz. We hear you have a complaint against the Party. Come with us.’ So you can’t talk to no one here: not your wife, not your kids, no one. Why do you think Fidel ain’t got no wife?”

He sat back and rested and drank the beer. There was a photo of Fidel, thirty-five years before, on the wall; a picture of Camilo. There was the sound of the fat boy mumbling something to his gods.

“I tell you something,” the old man went on. “It ain’t so bad for me. I’m old; I’ve seen worse; I’m not goin’ anywhere. But it’s the kids who suffer. And when they suffer, I suffer twice. So I figure the best thing is not to tell them too much. It’s better they don’t know about the past. Because the more they know, the more they suffer. Already, they suffer. They say, ‘I want a T-shirt.’ But to pay for it, I got to get my hands on eighty bucks. They say, ‘Father, give me an ice cream cone.’ But I can’t get ice cream. You got a hundred dollars, but still you can’t get a pound of rice around here. You got a thousand dollars, but still you can’t buy a chicken. So they cry. And when I see that, I want to cry too. But I can’t. Can’t let them see how I feel. Can’t tell them I still have nights, even now, after thirty years, dreamin’ what those guys could do to them. You know, I still wake up sometimes, and my arms are all shakin’, and it’s because I’m thinking what they could do to my kids.”

He went out to take a leak, and I tried to see what Hugo was doing. I could hardly see him, it was so dark, but he was sitting very still, and I wondered if he was thinking of his uncle. I was thinking
with one part of myself of a picture here; with the other, of our host.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said as he rolled back in, with a sailor’s kind of walk, and settled back into his chair. “I ain’t ’gainst Communism. I ain’t ’gainst nothin’ that will bring some food and good livin’ for my kids. Kids need ideals, somethin’ to believe in. Communism’s the only hope for guys like me—black, not too much education, never gonna be rich. But I’m not for fightin’ five years in the mountains for the same thing we’ve been killin’. It’s like killin’ a snake and then goin’ off and drinkin’ a gallon of snake juice. Where’s the sense in that?

“Those guys at the top, they ain’t so bad. I know them; I fought with them. Maybe they do want to help us sometimes. But they’ve got their minds so full of Gorbachev and Pan Am Games and perestroika shit, they don’t have any room for me and my kids down here. They’re thinkin’ ’bout pesos next year, and how their cousin’s goin’ to get a job. I don’t blame them; I’d be the same myself. But they ain’t helpin’ no one but themselves.

“See, Jackie Robinson was always the one I loved,” he went on, and I saw the man from next door coming in.
“Bueno. Sientate! Son Ricardo y Hugo. Amigos de José.”
We shook hands, and the conversation turned to Spanish. “I was just tellin’ ’em about the old Dodgers. Best team I ever saw. Saw Gil Hodges once, in Havana, and Duke Snider, in spring training. Heard Campy used to go to the Tropicana.”

The conversation went on to the national team, and Luis Tiant, and José Canseco, and then the neighbor must have figured his curiosity was satisfied, because he stood up and walked out.

The old man leaned toward us in the room. It was pitch black now. “See, I just talk like this, to you guys, for an hour, and already the hair is crawlin’ on my arms.”

“I guess you wouldn’t be comfortable with my taking some pictures round here?”

“Why d’you need pictures? Maybe this time you just keep the images in your head, okay? Remember them. Because pictures won’t show you anythin’ in Cuba. Everyone here is wearing a
mask. In the house, in the family, everywhere. For me, there’s nothin’ more important in life than your family. But even in the family here, you can’t talk. Maybe somebody believes one thing, somebody else believes the other thing. It’s like a civil war.”

His voice was coming to us out of the darkness.

“Look, my friends.” He lit a match. We could see only the outlines of his face. “Look. I’m lookin’. I’m searchin’. But I can’t see no hope anywhere. Can you? Can you see hope? Even with this light, can you see any hope? Where is it? I can’t see it.”

He shook us back into the dark.

“Like I say, I don’t need so much. For me, it’s not important. But it’s my kids: what have they got to look forward to? José, he’s crazy, talking to foreigners, speaking English, all that. But how can I tell him not to do it? It’s the only thing he’s got. What else has he got to hope for? More voodoo? A job with the Party? We needed change before, sure. Before, during Batista, there was plenty that was hurtin’. But they changed it too much. Now it’s crazier than Batista’s time. Then, if you had money, you could get something. Now, even a millionaire is broke.” He laughed again, a tired old man’s laugh.

“So it was lousy during Batista too?”

“Sure. It was shit. Real bad. Prostitutes and drugs; gambling, everything. No question Fidel made things better. But right now, you can’t talk about better or worse. It’s like choosing between death by gunshot and death by starvation. Maybe the gun’s better ’cause it’s quicker. But seems to me like we got liberation from craziness so we could get nothingness instead. Many more bargains like that, and old Fidel’s gonna be more broke than he is already.”

He looked back, and said nothing for a while. “Okay. That’s enough politics. Let’s eat. Have a fiesta.”

Somehow, after all he’d said, I didn’t have the heart to go through with the pig: it was like eating the guy’s savings. “That’s okay,” I said, shooting a glance over at Hugo. “We ate at the hotel. Maybe we’ll just stay and have a few more beers.”

“Make that rum at least,” he said, getting up and asking Pastor to hustle up a couple of bottles. “And from now on we speak Spanish again. Become innocent again.”

•   •   •

H
ugo went to bed maybe thirty minutes later, and after the last bottle of rum was finished, I let the old guy show me to my room. Hugo was already asleep in the bed, so I just found an open space on the floor and lay down. But there was no way I could sleep. I was wired, head buzzing, like on one of those nights when I had to go out with the guerrillas on patrol at four a.m., and I was so on fire that I’d wake up at two-thirty, and just lie there in the dark.

Outside our room, the pig was snuffling, and rooting around in the grass, and closer to home, I could hear Hugo tossing and turning. Then a sigh, and the sound of the sheet being furiously tossed aside.

“Can’t sleep?” I whispered.

“Not really. I think it must be the heat.”

“Or the drink. Or something in the air. Or the story we just heard.”

“You think it was a story?”

“Sure. You could tell the guy had it all ready for foreign consumption. Why do you think José sent us here?”

“You mean you don’t believe it?”

“No, I believe it. The fact he’s got it down so perfect doesn’t mean it isn’t true. When I listen to José and all the others gripe about the Revolution, I figure they don’t know anything else. They’ve lived all their lives with the Revolution, so everything that’s gone wrong they can blame on the Revolution, and everything that’s not the Revolution, they think is great. But this guy’s seen it both ways. I trust him.”

“I never thought I’d hear you confess to that.”

“Doesn’t come easy. Trust too many people in this job, and you wind up getting set up by every group around. Becoming a mouthpiece for anyone with an ax to grind.”

“So you believe only what you see?”

“Right. Only what I can catch in my camera. It’s not the whole truth, maybe, but it’s true at that moment. Right then, it’s what’s happening.”

There was silence again, and a groan from next door. “How about you, Hugo? What do you believe in?”

“Well, that’s not the kind of thing one usually talks about.”

“That’s why I’m asking you.”

“I have things I believe in.”