The Sugar King of Havana (15 page)

Similar confusions blurred the traditional lines of class warfare elsewhere on the island. Indeed, many of the strikes in Cuba that year were less because of worker dissatisfaction than a reflection of the country’s militant mood. At the Bacardi rum company in Santiago, a newly established union had also gone on strike, even as it paradoxically complimented the company in its founding statutes, while simultaneously affirming its own Marxist ideology:

All this suggests that reconciliation at Senado should have been possible. Indeed, on November 5, nineteen days after the Nacional meeting, a second group of Senado workers met in Havana at the newly formed Labor Ministry, with a follow-up meeting with Emilio arranged for three days later. Officials said that “a harmonious end to the conflict is expected on that day.” Instead, events disrupted the plan. As dawn rose over Havana on the day the Senado strike was due to be resolved, an air attack led by army officers and members of the ABC bombed Batista’s troops and President Grau in the Presidential Palace. The fighting continued in a series of skirmishes and ended with an artillery barrage on the rebels, who took shelter in the Atares fortress at the head of Havana’s harbor. The final death toll ranged between two and five hundred, with many more wounded. Amid this mayhem, the meeting between Emilio and the striking workers never happened. Ten days later, some six hundred kilometers east of Havana, the killings at Senado took place.

THIS IS WHAT I now understand happened at Senado on the morning of November 18, 1933, another inglorious date from an inglorious year that no Cuban commemorates but which shaped the island’s bitter history thereafter.

The events took place at a nondescript railway crossing called La Loma de Cortaderas, or cutters’ hill, a dusty rise two kilometers outside the mill. On one side there was a hoisting yard and the small house of a local farmer. On the other, next to the railway tracks, lay a field of sugarcane and beside it another of sweet potatoes. Three large trees relieved the desolation of the landscape. They stood over the crossroads and had thin green leaves, spiny branches, and distinctive yellow cat’s-tail flowers. Cubans know the trees as
algarrobo americano
; North Americans call them mesquite. I imagine a quietness in the air, something like the stillness that Emilito captured in an early-morning sketch of a Cuban back road, the calm only emphasizing the explosive presence of the men who would soon fill the scene.

A large group—some said two hundred men, others a thousand—topped the rise at about 9:30 that morning. A few were on horseback at the head of the column. The rest walked. They were mostly Haitians and some Jamaicans, imported to do the hard field labor that many Cubans and Spaniards felt beneath them; cane cutting is literally back-breaking work. The group reached the crossroads and one of the riders raised his hand as a signal. Everyone stopped. “Wait here,” he shouted. Another horseman drew alongside. “We will go ahead first to ask permission to enter the mill,” he explained. Together they rode off at a canter, their horses’ hooves throwing up small bursts of dust.

What the men now waited for at the crossroads, nobody knew for sure. Some believed they were waiting to join a rally at the mill to press home their demands. Others thought the rally was to celebrate the mill owners’ agreement to these demands, such as the eight-hour day. Some believed they were marching on the mill to take it over. They carried pointed sticks and sharp machetes—some even had rusty old guns, relics of the War of Independence—and wanted to advance right away. The mix of languages—Spanish, English, and Haitian patois—only increased the confusion.

After perhaps an hour, the railway tracks pinged, announcing a wagon’s approach. The waiting men looked up. There was no sign of the two horsemen who had left earlier. Instead, they saw a small group of uniformed rural guards walking toward them, led by a sergeant. Some of the guards carried rifles; the rest had .45-caliber pistols slung around their hips. One of the workers, mounted on a horse, pulled up next to a friend. “Hey buddy,” he said. “This looks strange.”

In the most folkloric version of the story, the sergeant then told the workers that the mill owners had agreed to the union’s requests and suggested a group photograph to mark the occasion. The workers lined up in front of the box camera, with its characteristic tripod and dark hood. The sergeant told them to huddle closer to fit into the frame. Then he drew back the black cowl and sprayed the men with bullets from the machine gun hidden underneath.

Eyewitness accounts gathered by a Cuban researcher fifty years later do not mention this camera–machine gun. Instead, they suggest that the sergeant approached the group, stopping close enough to see that the whites of the eyes of the men waiting there were yellow. To better hear what he had to say, the crowd formed a half-circle around the increasingly nervous sergeant. “There aren’t going to be any problems,” he said. “But if you want to come into the mill you have to throw down your weapons. Order please!”

The workers put their weapons on the ground as the sergeant told them and started to walk toward the mill, still in a half-circle. The sergeant and the other rural guards, feeling surrounded, panicked. Four of them suddenly dropped to their knees, lifted the muzzles of their weapons into the air, drew the rifle butts tight into their shoulders, and let loose a volley. The cane workers saw and heard the flashes of the gunshots, yet for a moment nothing happened. Then a shower of twigs, leaves, and yellow flowers fell on them from the branches of the trees above. The crowd began to swirl in panic. Some men threw themselves onto the ground; those on horseback ducked. When they looked up again they saw the soldiers’ rifles pointing directly into their midst. Then the scene really exploded. The horsemen dug their heels into their horses’ flanks and charged forward, trampling the others lying by them on the road. Everything spun out of control. There were more gunshots. The cane cutters started to run. Some scrambled into the cane field. Others climbed the high earth banks that flanked the railway lines. From the top, they tumbled into the gulley below, where some later said a squadron of soldiers was waiting. According to some reports, they did have a large machine gun, mounted on a tripod on an open railway truck, and opened fire.

One of the many inconsistencies that thread through this terrible incident is that when I asked my immediate uncles and aunts, none of them had even heard about it. I showed them a macabre photograph that I found in my grandmother’s photo album. It lay incongruously between charming scenes of her childhood at Senado: simple interiors of her uncle Pedro’s house with clapboard walls and bare wooden floors; my grandmother on a swing in the yard; the amateur league baseball games, where the famous Cuban slugger Roberto Ortiz, “the Giant from Senado,” first swung a bat. This gruesome picture, by contrast, showed three men in military uniform sitting around a machine gun on a tripod loaded with a bandolier of ammunition.
¿Qué?
my relatives had all exclaimed in horror and doubt.

I thought perhaps my great-aunt might remember something. So on a sultry July afternoon, I drove to her roomy ranch house in Belle Glade, a featureless agricultural town seventy miles north of Miami set amid grass and sugarcane fields that run straight to the horizon.

Tía Angelita is ninety-five, old enough to have known about the strike and sharp enough to remember it. She was sitting in a cane rocking chair when I walked into her front room, dressed in a floral print dress with a small gold chain and cross around her neck. A portable radio played tangos on a small table by her side. “The music keeps me company,” she explained, as I bent down to kiss her on the cheek. Angelita is a warm and courageous presence: although half-blind, she has lived alone since Don Alvaro, her husband, died a few years ago. One of Bernabé’s grandsons by his first wife, Alvaro had remained in Senado to manage its ranch, a kind of Camagüeyano
High Chaparral
. Indeed, in his swaggering youth Alvaro looked like the Marlboro Man, and cowhands would remove their hats, bow their heads as a token of respect, and murmur “Don Alvaro” when he did his morning rounds. Alvaro and Angelita lived at the mill after marrying in 1935.

Yes, Angelita said, she recalled the strike. She remembered that Emilio was staying in Havana at the time. She remembered the baseball player Ortiz, and certainly the Russian, Stodolsky. “He wanted to close down the warehouse, or only have it open for an hour a day,” she said. “Alvaro often spoke to me about that.”

We sat around a glass-topped table, and Angelita started to caress the surface as we talked. A large wooden bookshelf ran along one side of the room behind her, filled with the histories of great men. On a middle shelf, a bronze statuette of a solemn heifer stood guard next to a biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In one corner, on the books’ spines, I saw the names of the English Romantic poets, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, that Alvaro liked to read. I asked Angelita about the massacre.

“What massacre?” she replied. I described what I knew. She looked puzzled and thought about it for a while.

“Well, I am not sure there was a killing,” she said. “I never heard of such a thing, and I talked to everyone in the mill, you know. Not just the
Sanchezes
,” she added with gentle emphasis.

Angelita’s brow furrowed above her one good eye, magnified in the spectacles. She riffled through her memories. Then she made up her mind.

“No, there was no killing,” she said firmly, and patted the table softly with her left hand.

Two days later, Angelita telephoned me in Miami to say that she had spoken to a friend whose uncle had also once worked at Senado and he thought that, yes, something might have happened, maybe there had been a killing after all, someone in Cuba had even written a book about it apparently. At the time, though, it all felt very much like Macondo, the mythic town of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
in which Gabriel García Márquez describes a historic and similarly disputed massacre of banana workers that took place in northern Colombia in December 1928.

MAYBE TWENTY-TWO PEOPLE did die that morning in Senado in 1933, maybe less. Maybe there was a machine gun disguised as a camera, or mounted on a tripod in an open railway carriage, or maybe not. Probably not; it wasn’t in keeping with traditions at the mill. The British ambassador who subsequently investigated the death of Elijah Sigree, a forty-one-year-old Jamaican worker killed that day, noted in his dispatches to London that Senado “always had a good reputation as regards its treatment of . . . laborers.” Still, the times were such that a massacre
could
have happened that morning.