Cuba (7 page)

The range was closing rapidly, but still Jake

didn’t see the MiG. He looked at the target

dot in the heads-up display, but the sky was huge and the

Cuban fighter too far away, although it was almost as

large as the F-14.

The MiGo was about four miles away when

Jake finally saw it, a winged silver glint that shot

by just under his right wing. Jake Grafton disconnected

the autopilot and slammed the stick over.

He pulled carefully, cleanly, craned his head and

braced himself with his left hand as he kept the turning

MiGo in sight.

The Cuban fighter rolled out of his turn heading

north. Jake leveled out on a parallel course.

Careful not to point his nose at the Cuban, Jake

let the Tomcat drift closer on a converging

course.

When the planes were less than a hundred yards

apart, he slowed the closure rate but kept moving

in.

Finally the two planes were in formation with their wingtips

about twenty yards apart.

“Look at that thing, would you”…”…Toad enthused. “Have you

ever seen a more gorgeous airplane?”

“I hear it’s a real dream machineea”…Jake

agreed.

“Oh, baby, the lines, the curves … The

Russians sure know how to design flying

machines.”

“If this guy has to jump out of that thingea”…Jake

asked Toad, “do you think Cuban

Air-Sea Rescue is going to come pick him

up?”

“I doubt itea”…Toad replied. “And I suspect

he knows that.”

“He’s got a set of cojones on himea”…Jake

said. “Bet he can fly the hell out of that thing,

too.”

In the Cuban fighter, Major Carlos

Corrado took his time looking over the American

plane. This was the first time he had ever seen an

F-14. Amazing how big they were, with the two men

and the missiles under the wings.

Carlos was lucky he had this hunk of hot

Russian iron to fly, technical generations ahead

of the MiGo-19’s and 21’s that equipped the bulk

of Cuba’s tactical squadrons, and he damn

well knew it. Cuba owned three dozen

MiGo-29’s and had precisely one operationalthis

onewhich Corrado kept flying by the simple

expedient of cannibalizing parts from the others.

He checked his fuel. He had enough, just enough,

to get home. Sure, he had no business being out

here over the ocean, but he wanted to fly today and the

Cuban ground control intercept (Gci)

controller said the American was here. One thing

led to another and here he was.

Now Carlos Corrado was on course to return

to his base near the city of Cienfuegos, on

Cuba’s southern coast. He checked the compass, the

engine instruments, then turned back to studying the

American plane, which hung there on the end of his wing

as if it were painted on the sky.

A minute went by, then the man in the front seat

of the American plane raised his hand and waved.

Carlos returned the gesture as the big American

fighter turned away to the right and immediately began

falling behind. Carlos twisted his body in his seat

to keep the F-14 in sight for as long as possible.

Big as it was, the F-14 disappeared into the

eastern sky with startling rapidity.

Carlos Corrado turned in his seat and eased the

position of his butt.

The Americans were two or three technical

generations beyond the Cubans, so far ahead that most

Cuban military men regarded American

capabilities as almost superhuman. They had read

of the Gulf War, of the satellites and com-

puters and smart weapons. Unlike his

colleagues, Corrado was not frightened by the

Americans. Impressed by their military

capability, but not frightened.

If I were smarter,

he thought now, still

would be frightened.

But the Americans and Cubans would never fight.

They had not fought since the Bay of Pigs and

doubtless never would. Castro would soon be gone and a

new government would take over and Cuba would become

a new American suburb, another little beach island

baking in the sun south of Miami, Key Cuba.

When that happy day came, Carlos Corrado

told himself, he was going to America and get a

decent flying job that paid real money.

Dona Maria Vieuda de Sedano’s daughters

arrived first, in the early afternoon, tocom tidy up and do

the cooking for the guests. They had married local men

who worked the sugarcane and saw her every day. In

truth, they looked after her, helped her dress,

prepared her meals, cleaned and washed the clothes.

It was infuriating to be disabled, to be unable to

do backslash

The arthritis that crippled her hands and feet made

even simple tasks difficult and complex tasks

out of the question.

Dona Maria managed to shuffle to her favorite

chair on the tiny porch without help. Her small

house sat on the western edge of the village. From the

porch she could see several of her neighbors”

houses and a wide sweep of the road. Across the road

was a huge field of cane. A canecooking

factory stood about a half mile farther west.

When the harvest began, the stacks belched smoke and the

fumes of cooking sugar drifted for miles on the

wind.-

Beyond all this, almost lost in the’distance, was the blue

of the ocean, a thin line just below the horizon, bluer

than the distant sky. The wind coming in off the sea

kept the temperature down and prevented insects from

becoming a major nuisance.

The porch was the only thing Dona Maria really

liked about the house, though after fifty-two years in

residence

God knows she had some memories. Small, just

four rooms, with a palm-leaf roof, this house had

been the center of her adult life. Here she moved

as a young bride with her husband, bore her children,

raised them, cried and laughed with them, buried two

of the ten, watched the others grow up and marry and move

away. And here she watched her husband die

of cancer.

He had died… sixteen years ago, sixteen

years in November.

You never think about outliving your spouse when you are

young. Never think about what comes afterward, after happiness,

after love. Then, too soon, the never-thoughtab

future arrives.

She sat on the porch and looked at the clouds

floating above the distant ocean, almost like ships,

sailing someplace. …

She had lived her whole life upon this island, every day

of it, had never been farther from this house than

Havana, and that on just two occasions: once when she

was a teenage girl, on a marvelous expedition with

her older sister, and once when her son Maximo was

sworn in as the minister of finance.

She had met Fidel Castro on that visit to the

capital, felt the power of his personality, like a

fire that warmed everyone within range. Oh, what a

man he was, tall, virile, comfull of life.

No wonder Maximo orbited Fidel’s star. His

brother Jorge, her eldest, had been one of

Castro’s most dedicated disciples, espousing

Marxism and Cuban nationalism, refusing to listen

to the slightest criticism of his hero.

Jorge, dead of heart failure at the age of

forty-two, another dreamer.

All the Sedanos were dreamers, she thought,

povertystricken dreamers trapped on this sun-washed

island in a sun-washed sea, isolated from the rest of

humankind,

the

rest of the species….

She thought of Jorge when she saw Mercedes, his

widow, climb from the car. The men in the car glanced

at her seated on the porch, didn’t wave, merely

drove on, leaving Mercedes standing in the road.

“Hola, Mima.”

Jorge, cheated of life with this woman, whom he

loved more than anything, more than Castro, more than his

parents, more than

anything,

for the Sedanos were also great lovers.

“Hola,

my pretty one. Come sit beside me.”

As she stepped on the porch, Dona Maria said,

“Thank you for coming.”

“It is nothing. We both loved Jorge….”

“Jorge…”

Mercedes looked at Maria’s hands, took them in

her own, as if they weren’t twisted and crippled.

She kissed the older woman, then sat on a bench

beside her and looked at the sea.

“It is still there. It never changes.”

“Not like we do.”

The emotions twisted Mercedes’s insides, made

her eyes tear. Here in this place she had had so

much, then with no warning it was gone, as if a mighty

tide had swept away all that she valued, leaving

only sand and rock.

Jorgeoh, what a man he was, a dreamer and

lover and believer in social justice. A true

believer, without a selfish bone in his body … and of

course he had died young, before he realized how much

reality differed from his dreams.

He lived and died a crusader for justice and

Cuba and all of that… and left her to grow old

alone … lonely in the night, looking for someone who

cared about something besides himself.

She bit her lip and looked down at Dona

Maria’s hands, twisted and misshapen. On

impulse leaned across and kissed the older woman on

the cheek.

“God bless you, dear childea”…Dona Maria

said.

Ocho came walking along the road, trailed by four

of the neighborhood children who were skipping and laughing

and trying to make him smile. When he turned in at

his mother’s gate, the children scampered away.

Everyone on the porch turned and looked at him,

called a greeting as he quickly covered the three or

four paces of the path. Ocho was the Greek god,

with the dark hair atop a perfect head1, a

perfect face, a perfect body … tall, with

broad shoulders and impossibly narrow hips, he

moved like a cat. He dominated a room,

radiating masculinity like a beacon, drawing the

eyes of every woman mere. Even his mother couldn’t take

her eyes from him, Mercedes noted, and grinned

wryly. This last childshe bore Ocho when she was

forty-foureven Dona Maria must wonder about the

combination of genes that produced him.

Normally an affable soul, Ocho had little to say this

evening. He grunted monosyllables to everyone,

kissed his mother and Mercedes and his sisters

perfunctorily, then found a corner of the porch in which

to sit.

Women threw themselves at Ocho, and he never seemed

to notice. It was almost as if he didn’t

want the women who wanted him. He was

sufficiently different from most of the men Mercedes

knew that she found him intriguing. And perhaps, she

reflected, that was the essence of his charm.

Maximo Lui’s Sedano’s sedan braked to a

stop in a swirl of dust. He bounded from the car,

strode toward the porch, shouting names, a wide grin

on his face. He gently gathered his mother in his arms,

kissed her on both her cheeks and forehead, kissed

each hand, knelt to look into her face.

Mercedes didn’t hear what he said; he spoke

only for his mother’s ears. When she looked away from

Maximo and his mother she was surprised to see

Maximo’s wife climbing the steps to the porch.

Maximo’s wifejust what

was

her name”…ccdemned forever to be invisible in the glare of the

great man’s spotlight.

Another dominant personalitythe Sedanos

certainly produced their share of thoseMaximo was a

prisoner of his birth. Cuba was far too small for

him. Amazingly, be-

cause life rarely works out just right, he had found

one of the few occupations in Castro’s Cuba

that allowed him to travel, to play on a wider

field. As finance minister he routinely visited the

major capitals of Europe, Central and South

America.

Just now he gave his mother a gift, which he opened for

her as his sisters leaned forward expectantly, trying

to see.

French chocolates! He opened the box and let his

mother select one, then passed the rare delicacy

around to all.

The sisters stared at the box, rubbed their fingers across

the metallic paper, sniffed the- delicious scent,

then finally, reluctantly, selected one candy and

passed the box on.

One of the sisters’ husbands whispered to the other, just

loud enough for Mercedes to overhear: “Would you look at

that? We ate potatoes and plantains last month,

all month, and were lucky to get them.”

The other brother-in-law whispered back, “For

three days last week we had absolutely nothing.

My brother brought us a fish.”

“Well, the dons in government are doing all right.

That’s the main thing.”

Mercedes sat listening to the babble of voices, idly

comparing Maximo’s clean, white hands to those

of the sisters’ husbands, rough, callused,

work-hardened. If the men were different, the women

weren’t. Maximo’s wife wore a chic,

fashionable French dress as she sat now with Dona