Voodoo Eyes (21 page)

In the meeting room, he introduced Max around as a book writer.

Max was met with shrugs, grunts and plenty of suspicion. He recognised the names, recalled the crimes and dates of flight. He hadn’t spoken to any of them the previous night because they weren’t in the phonebook. Yet he sensed that word had spread, that they knew of him already and they didn’t like what they saw. Maybe they’d smelled out the cop in him. Maybe it was because his white face didn’t fit his black name. Or maybe it was simpler – the close-knit community’s suspicion of the outsider.

The only people Gwenver didn’t introduce him to were two stern-faced men stood at the door, legs apart and arms folded, thick, muscle-ridged forearms, overdeveloped club-bouncer physiques crammed into full Panther regalia. They didn’t intimidate him. Bodybuilders couldn’t do much when it came to fighting. No flexibility. Meat too heavy on the bone. One tap on the jaw button and they were down and out.

Apart from the round unvarnished table and chairs, and a dusty fan that wasn’t working, the room was bare – just dirty floorboards, some loose and bent upwards; partially paint-stripped walls, the room’s previous colours showing through – white, blue, green and possibly yellow.

The newest thing there was a black-and-white picture of Che Guevara – the same iconic Alberto Korda picture reproduced in giant relief at the Plaza de la Revolución: Che in his starred beret and wispy beard, his faraway windswept look, a hint of a smile on vaguely simian features. The very same image was on sale as a T-shirt, postcard, poster, button, bandana, signet ring, coffee cup, blanket and pillowcase in every souvenir shop and on every street corner. Rebellion turned into convertible pesos. And there was one of these photographs hanging in every Cuban building. It was a quasi-obligatory ornament. Just as it had been de rigueur for young Western radicals in the sixties and seventies, except that they’d had a choice. In Cuba, not to have Che on display meant you were against the fundamental principles of the state, against the very revolution it was built on. Che was a nursery rhyme, learned in kindergartens. Che’s life was taught at school and analysed in college. God wasn’t officially worshipped in Cuba, but Che was. The real Che was probably turning in his grave now.

Max was shown to a chair by an open window. Beyond, he heard traffic mingling with the sound of horses’ hooves, the voices of children rising above those of adults.

The meeting started. Everyone stood and raised a clenched fist.

‘Say it loud!’ shouted Gwenver.

‘I’m black and I’m proud!’ came the reply.

‘Saaay
it
loud
!’ Gwenver raised his voice.

‘I’m
black
and I’m
proud
!’ a dozen old Panthers responded, although no louder than before. Max noticed one of the fists trembling, palsied, like the head of a withered rose about to fall off in a gentle breeze.

‘Brothers and sisters … You gotsta …
say it loud
!’ thundered Gwenver.

‘I’m black and I’m proud!’
they yelled back, voices ragged, the volume dropping, the effort provoking wheezes and coughs.

Gwenver had mercy on them.

‘Right on, brothers and sisters, right on, right on. Please sit yo bad selves down.’

They took their places, looking relieved and exhausted. The jug of water got passed around. It was empty by the time it made it back to the middle of the table.

‘Last week,’ Gwenver began, ‘America elected its first-ever black President. A
black
President. A genuine African-American. What y’all think this’ll mean for us?’

‘As black Americans or “domestic terrorists”?’ asked a woman.

‘Same difference,’ a man quipped. He had a battered walking stick propped up in front of him.

‘I say it’s wack, brother,’ said the man next to Gwenver. He looked fresh off skid row. Max had smelled booze on him when they were introduced. Not just on his breath, but coming out through his pores, distilled in his sweat. A few days’ uneven beard growth sanded his puffy face and he wore a pair of thick-lensed glasses with both arms crudely taped to the frames. ‘Obama’s talkin’ ’bout dialogin’ wit’ tha’ enemy. Which means Cuba. Which means we at risk o’ extradition.’

‘If only the
other
guy’d won,’ said another woman.

‘Right on!’ a male voice agreed.

‘Bush was good for us,’ said Stickman.

‘Bad for the world,’ a woman grumbled in a raspy voice.

‘This ain’t
’bout
the world, sister, this ’bout
us!’
said Glasses. ‘Republican gunments always tighten up that ole embargo. Democrats get the White House, they start makin’ sweet wit’ Fidel. Travel restrictions come off, money comes in, then they conversate. Carter did it. Clinton too. Obama’ll do more of the same. And we ain’t even got Castro to have our back no mo’.’

Max wanted to laugh at the reasoning and its attendant irony, but he kept a straight face.

‘Nothing’ll really change as long as there’s a Castro in power,’ reasoned Gwenver. ‘There’ll be a few concessions on both sides, at the most. First we’ll get Cuban-Americans being allowed to travel here, then regular American tourists. Then Castro’ll free a few dissidents from jail – just enough to look good. That’ll take at least two, three years. And
then
Obama’ll have a new election to fight. He won’t want to upset the Cuban exile bloc by being
too
liberal, so he’ll hold back on doin’ anything drastic before 2013. The most change we’ll see here in our lifetimes is loud asshole tourists complainin’ about not bein’ able to get their McDonald’s.’

‘So you sayin’ we got nuttin’ to worry ’bout?’ asked the first woman.

‘Oh, we always got
somethin’
to worry about, sister. We in Cuba, remember. Somethin’s always goin’ wrong here,’ said Gwenver chuckling.

They took this as a cue to leave behind the politics and get personal. They complained about their homes, their neighbours, their lack of money, their lack of soap, their lack of painkillers. No one offered much in the way of sympathy. They just listened and waited to speak. They reminisced about the good old days, not the good old glory days, but when they’d had the things they missed. A million different kinds of toothpaste, two million different choices of soap. And they talked food a lot. Beef, mostly. Then candy. That was what America was to them now: one big inaccessible supermarket. They swapped personal news, how relatives were doing. A few had graduated, a few had steady jobs, a couple were in jail. The language was vintage blaxplo babble – words Max hadn’t heard spoken in decades, words that had changed meaning, been reclaimed and recast and reinvented. Sadness underscored everything they said. He heard plenty of regret and little defiance. They were broken people. They were obsolete and they knew it. Nothing to fight for, just scraps to fight over. Their revolution had been televised, sold as a DVD, uploaded on the internet as a two-minute YouTube clip and promptly forgotten about, in favour of hours of stick-thin celebrities and their stick-thin chihuahuas. They were homesick too. Desperately pining for the country they’d fled, whose government and institutions they’d vowed to bring down. He felt a kind of refracted pity for them: yes, they were murderers; yes, they’d robbed families of fathers and mothers, parents of children; but they hadn’t really gotten away with anything. They weren’t free. They’d merely run from one life sentence to another. Conditions in Cuba may have been far better than your average federal pen, but the principle remained the same. They were never going home.

‘You don’t think you’ll get extradited?’ Max asked Gwenver when they were back outside.

‘Last thing I lose sleep over,’ he said.

‘What
do
you lose sleep over?’

‘Mosquitoes ’n’ roaches – the important things in life.’ He smiled.

‘I don’t hear you protesting your innocence.’

‘Nothin’
to
protest. Someone next to you shoots a cop, they’re guilty not you.’

Max could have challenged him on the particulars – but he didn’t. He wasn’t here for that and he wasn’t here for Gwenver; plus he didn’t want to risk pissing the guy off and alienating him.

The PIE meeting had lasted two hours. The conversation petered out naturally, until Gwenver called time on the proceedings. He’d taken a small black notebook out of his back pocket and asked a couple of people for their new phone numbers; then he asked if anyone needed anything in the way of food and toiletries. Almost everyone clamoured for toilet paper, and nearly as many were short on soap and toothpaste. Gwenver wrote down the orders, this time in a red notebook. He quoted prices. Everyone complained and a few tried to haggle him down, but they all handed him money. Then it was goodbyes and promises to see each other again the following month; same time, same place. No one acknowledged Max on the way out.

‘Your first time in Havana, right?’ asked Gwenver.

‘You can tell?’

‘Sure. You got newbie’s eyes. All that wonder at your surroundings. I don’t blame you. This place took my breath away too, first time I saw it. Let’s walk.’

Havana was a beautiful ruin, a crumbling museum where sightseers had gone for an hour and stayed a lifetime, a well-heeled slum of once-grand buildings turned into hovels. At first glance these appeared condemned and empty, but were in fact full of people, their pale forms visible skirting the dark recesses of windows and doorways and balconies, indifferent to the loud bustle beyond and below them; the flocks of tourists on guided tours, the hustlers, the idling couples, the bike taxis, the dozens of schoolchildren in maroon uniforms, and the passing cops – one every thirty seconds – grey berets, light-blue shirts, dark-blue pants, earpieces, shoulder radios, guns – forever vigilant.

Max and Gwenver cut down side streets where the buildings seemed to bow towards each other, opposing walls practically touching. The road surfaces were buckled and bursting open, or else lumpy and uneven. Every few blocks they’d come across taped-off ruins of indeterminate vintage, hunks of rubble spilling across the street, people circumventing the collapsed mess.

Everywhere they went they saw the Capitolio – the pre-Castro parliament building, and a close cousin to the Capitol building in Washington, its equal in size and stature. The pale white dome dominated the rust-coloured, discombobulated cityscape, resplendent and apart, as though it had been dropped there intact from another place altogether.

They crossed the Prado and made for a wide paifang arch, which marked the beginning of Dragones Street and Barrio Chino – Havana’s very own Chinatown. The arch had been a gift from the Chinese government. In the plaque they’d misspelled ‘Chino’, dropping the ‘C’: it read ‘Barrio Hino’.

They stepped out of the blistering sun and walked down a long arcade, past cracked and chipped curlicued columns. The worn tiled walkway had become grey and glassy, so that their reflections came back faint and dark, like fish gliding beneath the surface of a greasy lake. People were working in every doorway – banging, hammering, sawing, drilling, welding. There were men resoling shoes with strips of discarded tyre, children making sculptures out of old soda tins, women planing tables and varnishing chairs, an old couple making crockery from a pile of broken china.

A stray rottweiler came trotting towards them. The dog looked bewildered, stunned by hunger and heat, a jumble of bones wrapped in a coat jumping with fleas. Whenever it got close to someone, it swerved sharply away, giving the passer-by a wide berth.

‘Dogs scared o’ people here,’ said Gwenver. ‘That’s ’cause o’ the so-called “Special Period”. Back in the nineties there was a food shortage. Meat, specifically. People ate anythin’ they could catch – ’cept each other. Most of the zoo animals disappeared and pets ended up on dinner plates. The government took to mass breedin’ rodents for food. You ever eat a rat?’

‘No. You?’

‘Sure have. Tasted a bit like rabbit. Say, you hungry?’

28

They walked on through Havana’s Chinatown – once the biggest and most prosperous neighbourhood of its kind in Latin America, now reduced to a single street comprised mainly of restaurants with names riffing around either ‘China’ or ‘dragon’, the décor pagoda-lite and chintzy. The menus offered mostly pizza and pasta. At the end of the road they came to a large pale-orange house with immaculate white balconies.

Gwenver rapped on the door three times. A few moments later a voice asked who it was.

‘Malcolm X,’ he said.

The door was opened by a young, beautiful dark-skinned woman dressed in an ankle-length turquoise Chinese dress with floral patterns running down it. The dress was shoulderless and tight, the sides split up her thighs. She was wearing too much make-up and a pair of heavy glittering earrings that stretched her earlobes to points.

She greeted Gwenver with a smile broken by a slight scrape of lipstick and a fast tumble of words Max didn’t understand.

She led them inside.

Max had expected to find himself in a brothel, but it was a restaurant. The walls were all hung with dense crimson drapes, roaring gold dragons stitched into each. Garlands of red paper lanterns, strung across the ceiling, emanated a muted glow, giving the place the feel of a huge luxury coffin with a poorly fitted lid.

A dozen or so people sat around marble tables eating pizza and sucking up spaghetti. Every last one of them oozed affluence. There wasn’t the slightest hint of poverty or struggle about them. They were dressed in designer labels and jewellery. Hair, teeth and skin camera-ready perfect. The men were Latin-lover handsome, the women break-your-heart beautiful. They were young-looking, no one south of mid-thirties.

The woman summoned a waiter and he took them to their table. Like the woman, he was Cuban but dressed Chinese: white tunic, buttoned up to the collar, billowing black pants, black slippers and a black skullcap with a thin black ponytail running down the length of his back. The hair extension had been sewn into the back of the cap.