King of Cuba (6 page)

The seas grew choppy as the winds intensified from the south. The international weather channel reported that a hurricane was gathering strength off the coast of Suriname, contradicting the predictions of that idiot meteorologist who’d reassured everyone of balmy days ahead. Carajo. How many sugarcane crops had been destroyed by hurricanes in the last sixty years? How many power lines downed, factories leveled, military installations laid to ruin? It was the one recurring disaster the tyrant couldn’t blame on the Yankees.

His cohorts in Latin America whispered “yanquis” the way they whispered “fate,” that dark obedience, as if the Cold War were in effect and run by superpower decree. Not that there weren’t consequences to running afoul of the Americans—the tyrant knew that better than anyone—but their sanctions could be exploited for political advantage. Without the U.S. embargo, the Revolution couldn’t have survived. It’d needed a common enemy to blame for its economic ills. In the end consumerism, not guns, would destroy Socialism. Microwaves and computers, motorcycles,
iPhones, Omaha Steaks. Puta madre, his people would throw him out for a reliable supply of toilet paper!

The morning dragged on with the usual nonsense and sycophants. El Comandante had seen and heard it all a thousand times before. If only Ceci Sánchez were at his side again, handling the crap. The irreplaceable Ceci had been his lover and loyal aide-decamp in the Sierra Maestra. She’d taken care of his every need, down to relieving his blue balls. No other rebel was permitted to have a woman in the encampment, not that anyone envied his relationship with Ceci. She was exceedingly skinny, with no ass to speak of, and her teeth protruded unflatteringly during the rare times she smiled. Cuban men could put up with untold shortcomings in a woman, but a flat ass wasn’t one of them. They felt a good culo to be their inalienable right, like access to potable water or a nightly shot of rum. A woman without an ass was called a rana, a frog. There was no worse insult.

Ceci had marched and carried her pack in the mountains like any good soldier. She didn’t expect the royal treatment and was trustworthy and discreet. The woman proved to be a superb organizer, too, and an invaluable liaison with insurgents all over Cuba. Her responsibilities didn’t end after the Revolution, though her romantic relations with her famous lover did. During the rebels’ victory parade across the island, women began tossing their underwear and telephone numbers at El Comandante like he was Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley. Overnight it became the ultimate in radical chic to sport an unkempt beard, long hair, and a pronounced stink—and this in a country whose citizens had a mania for personal hygiene.

He didn’t know it then, but that long march to Havana, with its insistence of banners and speeches and ecstatic crowds, would prove the pinnacle of his power and prestige, as good as it ever got. After that, the grim business of governing began—battling
Yankees and Russians and traitors, the endless blood and gunpowder, expansions into Africa and elsewhere because the Revolution had to prove itself on the world stage. Lately, his enemies had taken to calling Cuba a basket case, a floating scar in the Caribbean Sea. He would die fighting their lies.

The tyrant had contemplated writing his memoirs but agreed instead to hundreds of hours of interviews with a sympathetic Spanish journalist. The resulting book—
Conversations in the Socialist Cathedral
—fell short of his expectations. El Comandante thought that if he were writing his autobiography he would arrange the chapters thematically, focusing on such crucial subjects as babalawos, the Russians, and his first wife, Miriam. Carajo, Miriam could fill a tome all by herself. The sight of her in her wedding gown walking down the aisle of the little church toward him . . . Bueno, that was the happiest moment of his life. It infuriated him to think that Miami, home to his most pestilential detractors, was the city in which he’d spent the first, unforgettable days of his honeymoon. Ay, Miriam! Her eyes had been like an ecclesiastical argument for infinity, and the rest of her . . . Coño, however hard he tried, it was impossible to forget her, impossible to forget anything about her—even her legendary culinary bungling. Who could resist her palomilla steaks,
²
fried to leather, which required every fiber of his jaw muscles to chew?

To his dismay, the beautiful Miriam expected him to provide for their family and supply the niceties that came with a bourgeois life.
Why should he have to support one family, he’d argued with her, when history was offering him the chance to provide for an entire nation? Sadly, she remained stubbornly attached to convention and the demands of their newborn son. When Miriam’s brother got wind of her situation, he arranged to have her put on Batista’s payroll. His wife on his mortal enemy’s payroll! Nothing had hurt or humiliated El Comandante more. She divorced him at his lowest point, during his imprisonment on the Isle of Pines. But enough! It was too agonizing to remember.

He licked his lips, which were cracked and tasted of medicine. The only person to do his life justice in print was a weasely former adviser, now exiled in France. He’d had the gall to publish El Comandante’s life story as a novel. Ironically, it’d turned out to be the best thing that sorry-assed traitor ever wrote, a veritable magnum opus. To the tyrant’s surprise, he’d been enthralled by his fictional counterpart—on a par with Hamlet or King Lear; flawed, but irresistibly grandiose and compelling. In short, he couldn’t put the damn book down. Fictio cedit veritati, as those mothballed Jesuits used to say. Fiction yields to truth. The tyrant tore through the novel’s thousand-plus pages during the better part of a mild spring weekend when his wife beckoned him from his hammock to taste her rice pudding.

El Comandante took issue with just one detail of that detestable defector’s book: for the record, his pinga, fully engorged and ready for action, was not 6.2 inches, as erroneously reported, but a proud, thick, majestic 6.6.

When the tyrant was still in short pants, his mother used to take him on surreptitious visits to a babalawo two towns away. It wasn’t easy for her to escape her Galician husband for an afternoon, distrustful as he was of anyone who charged hard-earned pesos for a less than concrete exchange. Papá understood this: a hectare of sugarcane for a pair of superlative oxen; a cartload of mountain pine carved into so much rustic furniture; a day’s backbreaking fieldwork for a day’s meager pay. But sacrificing perfectly healthy farm animals for the dubious promise of spiritual betterment? That upset the balance of justice in his head. Not that he didn’t frequently tip the balance in his favor with a meaty thumb. Business was business, after all. To Papá’s mind, these country shamans did nothing but prey on an ignorant pueblo’s superstitions and fears. All the same, he took great pains to avoid their wrath.

At the babalawo’s home, dozens of candles had flickered on and around an enormous altar, illuminating pumpkins, gold chains, tureens, cowrie shells, decapitated doves, strings of beads, and a panoply of plaster saints. The babalawo told Mamá that her son had the fire of Changó in him, that he wouldn’t spare his enemies on the playground or on the battlefield. Not long afterward, the young tyrant beat a schoolmate—an arrogant heir to the Bacardi fortune—to within an inch of his life for calling him what he undeniably was: un hijo de puta.

Later, when the rebel leader was ensconced in the Sierra Maestra, the island’s babalawos prayed for his success, sacrificing rams, bulls, turkeys, and Guinea fowl in his name. And on the day he triumphantly marched into Havana with his band of ragtag men, thundering at the crowd of one million that had welcomed him to
the great plaza, the same babalawos released a flock of white doves that soared and swooped over the people, signaling their approval. The god of fire, Changó incarnate, had ascended to power. So what if one of the doves trained to land on his shoulder took a shit on it? Fucking bird. Nobody was the wiser.

Verbatim Package Directions for Café Mezclado

“RECOMENDACIONES PARA SU ELABORACIÓN:

El agua a añadir no sobrepasará a válvula de la cafetera. El café que usted añada en el coledor nunca debe ser comprimido. Coloque la cafetera sobre la hornilla preferiblemente a fuego lento.”

What they don’t tell you: LIGHT THE BURNER, AND RUN LIKE HELL!

1.
Resolver,
to resolve, is Cuba’s national verb. This could mean anything from “resolving” a cake for a niece’s quinceañera to “resolving” the Revolution’s overreliance on imports.

—Fulgencio Correa, grammarian

2.
During the Special Period, I was asked, as chef of Cuba’s most popular cooking show, to present a segment on palomilla steaks at the sentimental behest of El Comandante. Of course, I had to substitute pounded grapefruit rinds for the impossibly scarce beef and still make it appetizing for my viewers. The Maximum Leader confided in me at the time that he, too, had been denied beef along with, as he put it, “nearly every other goddamn pleasure known to man.”

—Hortensia Ramos, celebrity chef

Goyo brought violets. They would wilt in this heat, but they were Luisa’s favorite flowers and he’d promised her when they were courting that she would never do without. In Cuba, violets had been a rarity—mysterious, delicate, otherworldly—and his wife had feigned similar airs. Now that she was dead, Goyo had vowed to visit her in the cemetery once a month; not often enough, he imagined Luisa complaining. Usually he came on a Tuesday morning to avoid the weekend rush and midday heat.

He placed the violets at the foot of her headstone—a pink Italian granite engraved with gold lettering—then set up his portable folding chair and a battery-operated CD player loaded with Enrique Chia’s trademark boleros. Such “soundtracks” had heightened Luisa’s sense of self-importance and provided her with narratives adaptable to her own life. After she’d discovered Goyo’s early
infidelities, Luisa had swooned and sobbed along to many a Julio Iglesias album. A desperate Goyo had considered (briefly) forgoing extramarital affairs altogether in exchange for his wife’s promise to banish the balladeer’s insipid songs from their home forever.

The fluttering of offerings to the dead—balloons, silk flowers, the papery scratch of a birthday streamer—contributed to the cemetery’s serenity. The traffic on Calle Ocho was a low hum in the distance. The old-timers would be at Café Versailles holding court with their increasingly embellished stories. Goyo envied them. It was impossible for him to even remember a bad joke. This was a grave disability in Miami. That and his nonexistent dancing rendered him, in the eyes of his countrymen, a bogus Cuban. The exiles would be dissecting the latest news from Cuba, too. Hijodeputa.com had reported this morning that the tyrant was planning to address the United Nations in the fall. It was supposed to be a farewell address, though no one was calling it that, more like a last platform from which to mock his enemies.

To Goyo’s knowledge, nobody but he visited Luisa’s grave. Alina hadn’t attended the funeral, and only a handful of his wife’s Red Cross friends had shown up for the burial in their Sunday finery, gossiping and winking at him. Poor Goyito had driven down from Jacksonville, but he’d remained utterly silent and dry-eyed during the ceremony. To her dying day Luisa had believed that their son wasn’t mentally ill but pretending to be crazy, as she’d crassly put it, for profit. “Aren’t there easier ways for a clever boy to make money?” Goyo had argued back. But his wife was impervious to logic. After he’d tossed the clumps of requisite dirt on Luisa’s coffin, Goyo was blindsided by a crushing, unexpected loneliness. Often, he dreamt that she still slept beside him. Luisa had been an agitated constant in his life for six decades—and damn it, he missed her.

An eclipse of white moths converged on his wife’s grave. This
would’ve horrified her. Among her many empty enthusiasms, Luisa had spent a great deal of her later years battling the inevitable mildew and moth infestations that came with living by the sea. Every now and then Goyo dug into his closet and pulled out a guayabera or a pair of slacks disintegrating with holes, and this made him miss her all the more. With her passing, Goyo had lost much of his own history. His wife’s memory had been highly selective—for his concrete failings and her imaginary triumphs—but also for their early, tender love.