King of Cuba (9 page)

The traffic was light on the highway that divided the northern perimeter of the swamp. Mangroves stretched as far as the eye could see, twisted roots emerging from the brackish water like a form of insanity. A snake crossed the road, its slide of muscles sheathed in stippled yellows and greens. Goyo calmed himself with images of the tyrant lifelessly splayed on a zinc-coated autopsy table. What was his own life worth if he wasn’t willing to risk it for what he believed more fervently now than ever: that the despot must be killed and that he, Goyo Herrera, was the one to do it. Yes, he would become one with his fellow Cubans’ dreams, restore wholeness after so many fractured years, celebrate their liberation together in the great plaza of Havana.

A sudden downpour forced Goyo to pull to the side of the road. He checked the e-mail’s map against his larger one of the
area. There were few roads and no specific address he could punch into his GPS. Goyo switched on the radio but got only evangelical stations extolling the virtues of the Holy Spirit. He lowered his window a few inches and breathed in the stench of the swamp. It reminded him of the San Isidro barrio back in the capital, home to brothels and knife fights and herds of illegal goats. A great egret stared at him from atop a clump of mangroves before taking off in slow motion, its magnificent wings like an archangel’s.

Goyo felt his hands swelling, his feet aching. A mosquito bit him on the wrist before he could kill it. He rolled up his window and pushed the air conditioner to full blast. If he couldn’t stand the heat now, how could he survive the swamp? Coño, he’d forgotten his bug repellent and a hat against the sun. Pa’ carajo! José Martí hadn’t ridden into battle lathered in sunscreen. What were these incommodities compared to the task ahead? When the rain let up, Goyo decided to follow the main road to Cypress Hammock and let his instincts take over from there. He peered into his rearview mirror and spotted a blue Toyota with New Mexico plates. He dialed his daughter’s number and watched as the driver of the Toyota put a phone to her ear.

“Por Dios, Alina, what the hell are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“This is none of your business. Go home!”

“You left your computer on with that creepy message and—”

“I beg of you, hija, turn around and let me be!”

“You’re going off the deep end.”

“Enough!” Goyo hung up and pressed his foot to the accelerator. He would lose his busybody daughter if it was the last thing he did. There was nobody in front of him, and he pushed his Cadillac to sixty, seventy, eighty miles per hour. His car swerved on the slick road, but he held it steady. His cell phone rang and rang. Goyo had the impulse to shoot out Alina’s tires, but he didn’t want
to injure her. If his daughter showed up at the encampment of coverts, there was no way they’d accept him. Goddamnit, she was gaining on him.

By the time Goyo reached the visitors’ center, he was worn out from the strain of the chase. Alina pulled in beside him, got out of her car, and motioned for him to open his door. He refused. Before them a normal-looking family sat around a picnic table merrily cutting up a watermelon. Goyo disregarded his daughter’s shouts and her kicks to his Cadillac, which finally caught the attention of a park ranger. Goyo drew circles near his ear in the universal gesture of “crazy.” The ranger—name tag Cabrera, a scar from ear to jaw—brandished handcuffs, and a scuffle broke out. Goyo backed away and sped westward. By the time the cops subdued Alina, he would be deep in the swamp with his compatriots.

At a moldy outpost of a boathouse, Goyo commandeered a canoe under an alias and set off to find the band of Freedom Fighters. No longer would he evade his fate. It was close to noon, and the heat blazed around him like a web of flame. This must’ve been what his brother had endured at the Bay of Pigs. Poor Marcos, who’d broken out in summertime heat rashes, who’d sat in front of electric fans and bowls of ice to cool off, who’d rarely stepped outside their Vedado mansion with its frosted-glass doors and floor-to-ceiling shutters painted, at their mother’s behest, with the lives of the saints.

The paddle split and splintered Goyo’s palms, grew slippery with sweat. His skull throbbed from the advancing sunburn. Yet he was spellbound by the vegetation, the murky waters, the trills and whirs he couldn’t identify except for the ospreys, which were identical to the ones in Cuba. Goyo had heard the Everglades called a river of grass, and he pictured its ancient flow beneath his canoe. It felt tideless, eternal. Its scum rotted in the sun; its reeking ferment enveloped him. He paddled toward wherever he found an opening
in the mangroves. A bone wedged in some root appeared to be a femur, judging by its size and shape, and this unnerved him. He needed to rest for a few minutes, restore his energy. Goyo set down his paddle and, with considerable difficulty, slid to the bottom of the canoe. He laid his head against the warm wood of the seat. Exhaustion overtook him, and he slipped into a restive sleep.

In a dream, Goyo trailed Adelina Ponti to the Almendares River. Her dress was tight from her growing belly and cut low under the arms, which exposed soft excesses of breast. After the tyrant had impregnated her, she dropped out of the university and spent her days reading worthless romance novels procured from bookshops on the Calle de la Reina. Now she was crying alone under a blooming ylang-ylang tree. Goyo lamented the thousands of days he hadn’t spent at her side. An afternoon shower cooled his brow. It trickled to his lips, reviving him. When he opened his eyes, a half-dozen men in fatigues stared down at him with mocking eyes.

“¿Hombre, que coño haces aquí?” their leader demanded.

The right side of Goyo’s face felt on fire, and his throat was cotton-dry. “I am Goyo Herrera,” he croaked. “And I am here to fight.”

The men burst out laughing, but the leader stopped them with a slash of his hand. One of the soldiers sat on a stump with Goyo’s gym bag slung over his shoulder. He was examining the Chief’s Special .38.

“I got the message.” Goyo’s lips clung together as he spoke.

“Este viejo está loco de remate,” someone dismissed him.

A burly man emerged from the ganglia of mangroves, advancing on Goyo like a hungry animal. The black mole on his temple looked pasted on. “Who the hell is this?”

“I’m tired of doing nothing,” Goyo pleaded. “I can shoot. I’m not afraid to die.”

“We have no time to waste, Herrera,” the leader said, not unkindly. “You had cojones coming out here, viejo.”

The sun continued its maddening glare. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Around him the swamp gurgled and wheezed, attending to its grim business of decay. Goyo thought of how eventually everything would perish and decompose in this muck, far from civilization’s reach. The distant roar of a helicopter prompted the men to vanish back into the swamp. Goyo stayed put, rocking in his canoe. The helicopter grew closer. The mangroves stirred from its intrusion.

“There he is!” The voice was unmistakable, amplified and crackling through a bullhorn. Alina descended from the heavens, as he had expected she would, in a cloud of emerald flies. Goyo had half a mind to turn over his canoe and sink into the hissing abyss. Instead, he tightened his thigh muscles as the rope ladder fell to within reach.

Somehow Alina had convinced the park rangers to leave Goyo in her care. The two said little to each other once reunited. His daughter had trailed him to the swamp in order (purportedly) to save his life. Didn’t this mean that she loved him? Goyo wanted to be grateful, but he soon grew too enraged to speak. What next? Clamping a tag on his ankle like he was some goddamn endangered species? Sullenly, he agreed to follow her out of the Everglades. He flipped on the radio again. A news report was followed by a Haitian music program (he understood most of the Creole with his vestigial Canadian French) and a call-in show for troubled lovers.

Goyo had taken his beloved Adelina on three chaperoned dates, the last to a ravishing performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony at the Gran Teatro de la Habana. Adelina was of Italian
descent: her father a once-heralded bass baritone from Ravenna—that Byzantine city by the sea—who came to fame and fortune in the more indolent opera houses of the New World. A week after their symphony date, Adelina fell under the tyrant’s spell and lost her senses. A year later she wrote to Goyo, asking him to meet her at the same theater, but he ignored her plea. By then he was engaged to Luisa and had hardened his bruised heart. His pride prevented him from ever approaching Adelina again, though not from sending her money. Only Carla Stracci, his longtime mistress at the UN, marginally reminded him of his beloved, not so much in appearance as in the small gestures: a delicacy of wrist; their charming, clinging syllables. Thinking of the two women weakened Goyo’s already considerably weak knees.

As the theatricality of the Everglades gave way to the more groomed vegetation of south Miami, a bulletin announced that El Comandante had decamped to Mexico City to visit his famous writer friend, who was dying of complications from lung cancer. On an impulse, Goyo turned his Cadillac down a leafy side street of Coral Gables, then took the back way to the airport. He laughed to imagine the expression on Alina’s face when she realized he was missing again.

The sky grew overcast. Thunderclaps boomed from the south. Goyo savored the relief a storm would bring, but he didn’t want it delaying his flight. Of all the billions of variables at his disposal today, he’d chosen the most daring, and this pleased him.

The ticket clerk, a Mexican woman with elephantine legs, asked for his identification.

“I need to get on your next flight to Mexico City.”

“No reservation?”

“Only with destiny,” Goyo said, instantly regretting it.

“First-class, or coach?”

“What the hell, first-class!” Goyo couldn’t contain his elation.
When he learned it would cost him fifteen hundred dollars, however, he switched to economy.

“Passport, please.”

“¿Qué?”

“Your passport.”

“Carajo, I forgot it.” Goyo stood openmouthed. “Is there any way I can travel without it?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“This is urgent, señorita. A matter of life and death. Can’t you make an exception?” The last thing he wanted was to go home and face Alina.

“Perhaps you would like to travel tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” Goyo said, sagging with the ugly spectacle of another defeat. “Tomorrow is too late.”

1.
Who are we? Women who march to release our politically imprisoned husbands, brothers, lovers, and sons. I’ve been beaten, harassed, and twice jailed for trying to get my Carlos out. He sold illegal cigars, so what? How the hell else are we supposed to make a living around here?

—Jocelyn Matamoros, unemployed

El Comandante woke up with a start, his legs tangled in the top sheet. Damn these catnaps. Nothing was worse for courting ghosts. He’d had another dream about that hunger striker, Orlando Martínez, his head cowled in a yellow hood. With his bulging eyes and bony hands, that hijo de puta kept calling to him from the grave, twisting and hissing like a snake about to strike. Behind him stood a mob of Damas de Blanco, wailing like a Greek chorus. Insomnia was preferable to this torment.

His sleeping pills only perpetuated the nightmares. The long-dead Che had been popping up, foulmouthed and threatening to expose him. Other adversaries lined up to take their potshots: school yard bullies from Colegio Dolores, peasants he’d executed in the Sierra Maestra, a tremulous semicircle of forsaken lovers that included Adelina Ponti, with her face of pure sorrow. In one dream
Adelina stepped off a cliff into air saturated with a piano sonata, the pleats of her pink dress flaring like a sea anemone.

The tyrant fluffed a pillow and looked out at the sea. How many of his citizens would flee the island tonight under starry, hopeful skies? The Revolution had survived a crippling embargo, a full-scale military attack, shortages of every kind, but nothing on the order of what transpired after the Soviet Union collapsed. For the first time since 1959, people went hungry. Not even the high-protein soy blocks imported from China helped.
¹
Looting broke out in the capital. The crime rate skyrocketed. Butchers were getting laid for a few ounces of skirt steak. Those lucky enough to work in tourism were courted like old-style caciques.

El Comandante appeared on television every night during the Special Period,
²
exhorting his countrymen to stay optimistic and redouble their efforts for La Revolución. Si finis bonus est, totum bonum erit. If the end is good, everything will be good. But the end was not good. In fact, it was nowhere in sight. When the number of suicides spiked, the tyrant unveiled—with great fanfare—the Psychoanalytic Clinic for Revolutionary Rehabilitation. It was meant to offer citizens an outlet for their miseries. But the hastily assembled therapists were required to keep detailed notes on every disgruntled patient before turning the information over to the authorities. Only a handful of citizens ever took advantage of the clinic’s services. El pueblo, it seemed, was reluctant to
unburden itself with “talk therapy.” The only person interested in talking, they concluded grimly, was El Líder himself.