King of Cuba (12 page)

“What excuse can you give me, Fernando? That our people would rather watch
Gaucho Love
than listen to me?”

“I don’t like seeing you so agitated. You need to rest.”

“I’ll be fucking resting for eternity!”

Fernando had suffered countless of his brother’s tantrums over the years. To say anything else at this point would only invite more abuse.

“The people need to know that the Revolution must go on, with or without me.” El Comandante pulled at his beard. “Those
gusanos will undo everything, change the street names, tear apart our history.”

“That won’t happen, I promise you—”

“Who’ll take over once we’re gone, Fernando? When we die, so will the Revolution.”

“The Revolution will never die. The people will—”

“The people will sell us out for a bar of soap!” the despot cried, spittle flying.

During the worst of the Special Period, after the Soviet Union collapsed and its five billion dollars in annual subsidies to Cuba along with it, when basic necessities were scarce and the plumpish populace lost, on average, twenty-two pounds (statistics were kept on such matters), what Cubans complained about most bitterly was the lack of soap. The Revolution was brought to its knees, its citizens forced into prostitution (often for a few hotel toiletries), because the government couldn’t keep them squeaky clean.

“You underestimate them—”

“Or a cell phone. Or a plate of dichoso pork chops! We might convince everyone on this island that the sea is red, but let’s not deceive ourselves!”

“If I believed you, I’d put a bullet in my head.” Fernando lowered his voice. “You’re overexcited. Let me take care of this.”

El Comandante shifted onto his right hip, then changed the subject. “And what’s this I hear about plans to build luxury casinos in Varadero?”

“It w-will attract a higher caliber of tourist.” Fernando stuttered when he was nervous. He didn’t dare tell his brother about his preliminary talks with the Mexicans.
¹

“We’re not that desperate yet. Cancel it.”

“But—”

“I said cancel the casinos. We’re not goddamn Monaco here! Whatever happened to going green, anyway?”

“We’ll never be in the black by going green,” Fernando quipped.

“Cojones, you sound like a captain of industry.”

“Hermano, we
are
the captains of industry here.”

His brother had been succumbing to too many bourgeois indulgences of late—Rolexes, hot tubs, golf, and now casinos. Some Communist ideologue he’d turned out to be. El Comandante didn’t bother asking about the disastrous real estate reforms already under way.

“And the Bay of Pigs reenactment?”

“We’re having trouble getting those old planes to work.” Fernando avoided his brother’s gaze. “Besides, no one wants to play the bad guys.”

“Who the hell gets to decide what they want to do around here?” El Comandante struggled to sit upright. “Listen to me, Fernando. Everything must be perfect. Down to the combatants’ stinking underwear. Do you hear me? The eyes of the world will be watching us again.”

“I’m on it,” Fernando whined, then turned around and left.

Let him sulk, the tyrant grumbled. The Revolution’s party days were over. The sooner Fernando realized this, the better. The two were overly attuned to each other’s moods. It’d begun when they were boys and Fernando inexplicably stopped talking. For eight months he relied on his older brother to speak for him, to say Fernando hurt his knee, or needs to take a shit, or wants vanilla ice cream. One day they snuck into a neighborhood cockfight, and the favored rooster swiftly decapitated the other and plucked out its eyes in the first round. “Puta madre, did you see that?” With those words, Fernando rejoined the ranks of the
articulate. Now cockfighting was making a comeback in the capital. The best ring, by all accounts, was in Regla. Fernando wanted to shut it down, but the despot advised him to wait and strike when the ring was more flush with cash.

A pair of dazzling peacocks strutted and shrieked in the gardens below. The birds had been shipped from Madagascar at his wife’s request. El Líder studied their tremulous, iridescent plumage. These two had been impressing each other for years without a single female to distract them. When he’d complained to Delia about being surrounded by maricones, she’d nibbled on his ear and said: “Mi amor, you know as well as I do that boy animals are prettier than the girls.” Who was he to argue?

A stack of fresh reports was piled high on his desk: annual nickel production, last winter’s lobster harvest, revisions to the elementary school curriculum, tobacco exports to Switzerland, illegal marijuana production in Oriente, the trade imbalance with Mozambique, an exposé on the cross-dressing babalawos of Camagüey, another on Baracoa’s illicit moonshine operators. (Five people had died from the sweet potato liquor.) How the hell did he know what was true anymore? People told him only what they thought he wanted to hear. Nobody had the nerve to say that this plan was unsound, or that most government employees didn’t bother to show up for work on any given day. Cuba was riddled with corruption, hustlers, parasites; plagued by a culture of sinecure, amiguismo, back-scratching, ball-scratching. If you didn’t lie, cheat, or steal
²
you were considered stupid or incredibly naïve. If you happened to be a genuinely honest, hardworking revolutionary, you came under the worst scrutiny of all: accused
of being a spy, a sellout angling for some negligible advantage over your neighbor.

Seagulls soared along the shore, peering down at the glinting sea for fish. El Comandante took a swig of cognac from a flask hidden in his nightstand. It disheartened him to be so infirm and uncommanding. If only he could resuscitate the spirit of the early days, when the literacy campaign had taught a million peasants to read. Or figure out how to become a martyr, if he wasn’t already too damn old for that. In the fifties, Orthodox Party leader Eddie Chibás had shot himself in the stomach on his weekly radio show over a stupid political embarrassment and had become an instant saint. How Cubans loved their martyrs, roasting them over the fires of memory like suckling pigs!

The tyrant fixated on a crack in the ceiling. It looked, dispiritingly, like the state of Florida. For decades he’d ruled the country by jeep, traveling to its remotest corners to oversee the installation of electric generators, or the building of sugar refineries, or to slap the back of every last worker at a copper processing plant. His tireless work used to inspire his people. Not anymore. He felt cheated. So much effort, and for what? To watch his island sink into mediocrity and wholesale thievery? Each brick filched from a construction site, each vial of medication sold on the black market was a slap to his face.

The abuses got more outrageous every day. Just yesterday he’d heard that prison buses were being rented out for weddings, quinceañeras, and beach shuttles. That three tanks’ worth of oil from human remains (stolen from the Guanabacoa crematorium) were being sold on Havana’s streets as cooking oil. That everyone—rappers, cartoonists, school children—was mocking the moringa, a miraculous plant he’d taken great pains to import from India to feed the people. Black market hustlers had even gotten
ahold of the pesticide from the campaign against dengue fever and were auctioning it off to the highest bidder. Nobody on the whole goddamn island did a lick of work but complained all day about the lack of fucking mops. His were a people sans rigueur, as Napoleon might’ve put it. They expected the country to prosper without sacrifices on their part.

How the hell could he
not
take it personally?

El Comandante coughed up a knot of phlegm and summoned El Conejo with the push of a button. His principal adviser appeared without delay, nose twitching, teeth so severely splayed that they invited both revulsion and pity. El Conejo didn’t keep notes, relying instead on his computer database of a brain. In nineteen years of service, he’d forgotten nothing, nobody, not a single salient detail entrusted to him by the tyrant. The man couldn’t be blackmailed either, because he’d never been known to so much as blink with carnal interest at another living creature.

“Find out what’s going on with those hunger strikers. I want a full accounting.” People were surprised at how soft the tyrant’s voice could be in private, too; so opposite his public thunder.

“A sus órdenes, Jefe.”

Everyone thinks just because I work at a resort that I’m rolling in money. But the tourists who come here don’t leave tips. Since they’re on prepaid package tours, it doesn’t occur to them to leave me so much as a miserable peso for cleaning their rooms. So here’s what I do: short them a towel and pretend it was they who lost it. The hotel charges fifteen dollars for a lost towel, so
it makes sense for them to pay me a peso or two to “find” it. If the guests indignantly refuse (only the Germans refuse), they’ll still be charged and I’ll get my cut from the front desk.

—Idalia Ferrer, chambermaid

Every public appearance by the Maximum Leader required the efforts of dozens. If he didn’t look perfectly groomed and lucid—tremor-free, no slurring of words or faltering of any kind—the rumor mill worked overtime churning out more lies. The latest outrage making the rounds would be ludicrous if it weren’t so poisonous: that the tyrant was, in fact, already dead and the government was using a body double to maintain stability. But the lies that irked him most took aim at his manhood: that cancer had eaten away two-thirds of his balls; that his pinga had shriveled to the size of a Vienna choirboy’s. Maybe he should drop his pants on television and show those bastards what he still had between his legs!

Around him, the TV station was on high alert. Everyone was running back and forth and talking at once. His nephew Javier was the producer in charge of this mayhem. An ambitious little man with a theatrical streak, he was the opposite of his taciturn father. Whenever El Líder looked into his nephew’s eyes, he saw someone who wanted to stand in his shoes before he’d stepped out of them.

“Por favor, Comandante, look this way.” The makeup artist moved El Líder’s chin an inch to the right and patted some foundation on his nose with a spongy wedge. She’d been entrusted to make him look as healthy and youthful as possible by minimizing his liver spots, lightening his under-eye pouches, tinting his
lips and cheeks with a touch of color. Endless mariconería, but he submitted to these indignities for the sole purpose of deflecting viewers’ attention from his battered appearance to the substance of what he had to say.

A violent debate broke out over the degree of formality appropriate for El Comandante’s first speech in fourteen months. Should he stand in military dress behind a podium (with its added assurance of support), or appear relaxed on a sofa, more like the commander in chief emeritus? If this was going to be his swan song, the tyrant decided, then he would go down—if he was going down—like a soldier. A staff physician injected him with vitamins while a nurse spooned cough suppressant into his mouth. His dentures were pinching like the devil, but there was no time to adjust them.

If there was any grumbling about the bumping of the Argentine telenovela, nobody dared say so to his face. Often, he wished that Cuba could grow rich again. The despot recalled the fleeting possibility some years back that the island might be sitting atop huge oil reserves. Before the exploratory drilling even started, the United States had filed a slew of lawsuits, claiming that the oil, should it exist, belonged to them. In the end the reserves were far smaller than El Comandante had hoped and far too costly to drill. As his best economist told him: “Trying to extract it would put us all back in loincloths.”

A trio of perfumed wardrobe assistants helped the tyrant into his uniform. The jacket was heavy with medals. Why was it that the most beautiful women worked in television? For a time, El Comandante had preferred the taut angularity of ballerinas (Cuba produced the finest dancers in the world). Yet for all their grace and passion under the floodlights, they proved inhibited in bed, too critical of their bodies. To them, an ounce of fat was the stuff of tragedy. He’d devoted a great deal of thought to what constituted the perfect woman. He had his proclivities, of course—blondes
with blue or green eyes, tiny waists, ample hips, and the younger the better. Women over forty, with rare exceptions, were best viewed fully clothed or in the dark, though many were good for the game all night long. Ay, to have seen Delia as a seventeen-year-old in a tight white bathing suit strolling along the beach at—