Boy Who Said No : An Escape to Freedom (9781608090815) (2 page)

“Will you teach me the constellations, Grandpa?”

Abuelo chuckled. “I'll teach you all I know, my boy. Mark my words—someday it will come in handy.”

• • •

From the time I was a small child, my grandfather would sit me on his lap, his breath fragrant with smoke, and read the Bible to me. His was a hefty book with a cracked leather spine and pages as thin as gossamer. He told me about Moses and the parting of the Red Sea, about the leper Lazarus being raised from the dead, about Noah building his Ark. He taught me about God and the lives of the saints.

In his living room was a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He was depicted with a loving face, wavy hair, and fire leaping from a red puffy heart. After a cup of rich Cuban coffee, Abuelo would hold his fist to his chest, look at the picture and say, “Dear Jesus, save me from this heartburn!” I figured heartburn was something Jesus and Abuelo had in common, and that's why Abuelo asked for His help.

When I got a little older, Abuelo regaled me with tales of heroes such as Antonio Maceo, José Martí, Calixto Garcia, brave and honorable men who had fought for Cuba's independence from Spain. His eyes glowed when he spoke of them. He told me incredible things, like how Cuba's national anthem, “El Himno de Bayamo,” was composed from the saddle of a horse. It was my favorite story, and I pleaded with him to tell it to me again and again. When he described the 1868 Battle of Bayamo, I felt like I was there. When he was finished, we'd break into song:

Hasten to battle, men of Bayamo!
That the homeland looks proudly to you;
Do not fear a glorious death,
Because to die for the fatherland is to live.

To live in chains is to live
In dishonor and ignominy
Hear the clarion call;
Hasten, brave ones, to battle!

Then Abuelo would tickle me, and we would laugh.

• • •

When I started school, Abuelo helped me with my homework before we went out fishing. Sometimes he would try to tutor Gilbert and Luis. But they were not academically inclined. And Luis tried Abuelo's patience with his constant fooling around. After a while, he only helped me.

Three years my senior, my cousin Luis spent a lot of time at my house in Guanabacoa, a district of Havana. He was lively and fun and my family liked having him around. He and my cousins Tato, Gilbert, and Pipi spent so much time at our house when I was young I thought they were my brothers. Pipi was not his real name. It was just what we called him. Nicknames were common in Cuba.

Luis had his own way of thinking about things. When he got to the fourth grade, he just stayed there. For years. I told him he had to move on, but he stubbornly refused—even though he could.

“I like the teacher and I know the school work so it's easy for me,” was his excuse.

“But, Luis, you can't stay in the fourth grade forever.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's stupid, that's why.”

“It makes me happy.”

“You're happy being held back?”

“It's not being held back if you do it on purpose.”

“Aren't you bored?”

“No. I know the fourth grade material so well now the teacher says I can help her teach next year. So I'll be smarter than you—I'll be a teacher.”

“That's crazy, Luis. You won't be a real teacher. You'll just be a big fourth grader. If you know the material, why don't you just take the test?”

“Because I don't want to take the test, and I don't want to go to fifth grade. I'm happy where I am. I don't think that's stupid at all.”

I just shook my head.

• • •

Gilbert had his own little quirks. For the first two years of school he rarely washed his feet. His mother would reprimand him. But nothing worked. Like Luis, Gilbert was stubborn.

Gilbert liked to take his socks off in school and show off his pitch-black feet as if they were a badge of honor. Then he'd scrape the bottom of his feet on the floor beneath his desk to scratch an itch.

The girls in the class would wail and complain, but that just encouraged him. I felt sorry for any girl who sat next to Gilbert. Not only did she have to smell his feet all day, but when he took off his shoes and the odor grew worse, he'd shamelessly blame the smell on her. Gilbert loved girls, and this was his way of getting their attention.

There was no end to our boyish pranks. Some days we got together with our friend Jabao and rigged the blackboard so it would fall down when the teacher touched it. Then we'd all laugh so hard, we'd be sent to the principal's office. Some days Pipi would bring his pet parrot—the one he had taught to swear—to school in a brown paper bag and hide it under his desk. When the parrot let loose with a string of expletives, he'd blame it on someone else. Then we'd all laugh so hard, we'd be sent to the principal's office. Some days Gilbert would put glue on the teacher's seat and blame it on some hapless girl. Then we'd all laugh so hard, we'd be sent to the principal's office.

We drove the principal crazy. He was a strict disciplinarian who demanded to know the perpetrator of these acts. No one would ever snitch. Except Antonio.

Antonio was a slightly built boy, a fearful kid, the type of child other kids pick on. To make matters worse, his older brother was always beating him up. Antonio often showed up to play with a swollen lip, a black eye, a bruised arm. He always claimed to have fallen down.

On warm sunny days when the sky was dotted with fat white clouds, we'd all play hooky and go skinny-dipping in the area's rivers,
marshes, and streams. We would play tag, merrily skipping from one warm river rock to the next, our arms outstretched to keep our balance.

Jabao came up with the idea of playing hide-and-seek by using dry, hollow reeds that grew on the river banks to breathe underwater. For a while it was our favorite pastime. We would sneak up and scare the other boys, splashing and giggling until we almost drowned.

Since everyone in Guanabacoa knew one another, whenever we skipped school we had to figure out how to get back to our homes without being seen. Many limestone caves skirted the port of Cojimar, and a complicated warren of tunnels ran under the nearby
Rio Lajas.

Always on the lookout for someone who might report us truant, we ran from one tunnel and cave to the next, hiding from prying eyes and enjoying the thrill of it all. Our fear of being caught was somewhat abated because no one knew the ins and outs of these hiding spots better than we.

Mostly I hung out with boys, but there was a special girl in the neighborhood who had stolen my heart. Miriam was sweet and shy and had hazel eyes. My mother said it was just a crush—but it lasted for years. Whenever I was feeling upset about something, I'd talk to Miriam. If I found a caterpillar, I would show it to her, and I was always looking for presents to give her, like shells I had found on the beach or bright butterflies that had lost a wing. On the days my mother made cookies, I would hide one in my pocket for Miriam.

Every night the people on my block would dress up and go for a
paseo
, a stroll around the park. The boys would walk one way and the girls would walk the other, accompanied by stern
dueñas
draped in black lace shawls. The boys would wink and wave at the girls, trying to get their attention without attracting the wrath of the women in charge.

They say a small town is like a big family. That's how it was on my block. The people in my neighborhood knew all the houses and everyone in them. We knew whose mother was mean and whose father
was mad. We knew who was sick and who could come out to play. We knew whose aunt drank cane juice and whose uncle drank rum. We even knew the names of each other's dogs. That's just the way it was.

A lot was going on politically in Cuba while I was growing up, but I was too busy being a boy to notice. I was too busy playing baseball to know that Fidel Castro's poorly armed rebels had led a failed assault on the Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953, an assault that landed Fidel in the Presidio Modelo Prison for two years, but gave birth to a revolutionary movement that would eventually topple the government.

I was too busy playing marbles to know that although Fidel's forces comprised fewer than two hundred men, they often caused Batista's army of forty- to fifty-thousand to cut their losses and run.

I was too busy sunning myself on alabaster beaches to know that opposition to Batista in Cuba had been growing like rice in China, due to his pandering to the American mobsters and big business interests who controlled most of Cuba's resources and wealth. I was even too busy to notice that the dictator had been forced to flee Cuba on New Year's Day 1959.

But eight days later, I got my first inkling that something was happening in my country. Something Abuelo didn't like. That day, after my grandfather and I went fishing together, we stopped in Havana so Abuelo could get some coffee. We were both very tired.

As we walked down the magnificent
Malecón
, the wide seaside walkway that circles half of Havana, a line of heavily armored trucks rumbled by. This was the first in a column of cars, lorries, and tanks that would carry Fidel's now five-thousand-strong victorious rebels into the city.

Fidel and his men had been traveling for days from their camp located six hundred miles away in the Sierra Maestra, stopping to speak to rapturous crowds along the way. I could hear shouts and cheering nearby. When we turned the corner, I saw thousands upon thousands
of people lining the streets, smiling, laughing and hoisting placards that read
“Gracias Fidel!”

Many people seemed beyond jubilant, almost delirious. As the chanting grew louder, Abuelo's face grew dark, and he quickly reached for my hand. A number of rough-looking men in olive-green uniforms jumped down from the trucks. They were a tough, dirty bunch with grizzled black beards, waists bulging with guns, and feet shod in mud-covered boots. A tank rolled by with Fidel sitting atop a pyramid of men. Abuelo placed his body partly in front of mine, as if to protect me. I tugged on his shirt.

“What's going on?”

“It's Fidel and his rebels,” said Abuelo.

“What does it mean?” I was getting a little nervous, sensing my grandfather's unease.

“There's been a fight for control of the government,” he said. “Batista's out and Fidel is in.”

I looked at the men who had jumped off the trucks. “Are these the guys who won?” I asked. I could hardly believe that these scruffy, long-haired men could be the victors. But people on the balconies of the modern apartment buildings seemed to think so. They were waving red-and-black flags embroidered with a large white 26
Julio
, throwing confetti and chanting
“Viva Cuba! Viva Fidel!
” Several of the men were drinking Hatuey, a fine Cuban beer. I had never seen anything like it.

“Yes,” Abuelo said. “These are the guys who won.”

A fleet of long, black Cadillacs drove by. The men in the cars were honking their horns, laughing, and brandishing their guns. There were a lot of machetes on display, a lot of knives, a lot of guns. I was eyeing the cars' whitewall tires.

“Where did Batista go?” I asked.

“To the Dominican Republic. Took his family with him. After that, who knows?”

I looked up as several airplanes thundered by. “Why are there so
many planes?” We had to wait for a minute for the noise to die down before Abuelo could answer my question. I noticed some girls wearing tight red sweaters and short black skirts shouting “Fidel! Fidel! Fidel!” with the kind of enthusiasm young women usually lavish on movie stars.

“They're taking the Americans back to the States.”

“Why?”

“Shush, Frankie. Not now. You are asking too many questions. I'll tell you when we get home.”

Fidel approached the podium to address the crowd from the terrace of the presidential palace. He had a rosary wrapped around his neck and he was carrying a rifle. A bank of microphones amplified his voice so it could be better heard by us and by those listening to Havana Television and Cuban radio stations throughout the country. I stood on my toes, the better to see.

“Fellow countrymen—” he began. The crowd grew quiet. People looked mesmerized. A car honked in the background and then the sound died away. Fidel's voice rang out. “As you know, the people of Havana are expecting us on Twenty-Third Street—” The audience stood in rapt attention.

I looked up at Abuelo as Fidel droned on. His eyes had narrowed, and he was listening intently while still holding my hand. A few minutes into Fidel's speech, someone in the crowd released two doves into the air. We watched as they winged their way skyward. Then, as if by divine intervention, one swept down and settled itself on Fidel's shoulder—a symbol of universal peace. The crowd went wild.

Abuelo shook his head, and a cold chill ran down my spine. I was a little scared and very confused.

“Tell me,” I said. “Are you glad Batista's gone? Was his leaving something good or something bad?”

Abuelo drew in his breath. He let go of my hand and rubbed my head. “Time will tell. Now let's go get you an ice cream cone.”

But from the look on his face, I knew it was bad.

It was a bright Saturday afternoon, warm and dry as old crackers. I had finished my chores around the house and was riding my bike down the road with Gilbert. Dust rose beneath our tires and clung to the hair on our legs. Occasionally I had to wipe it from my nose. A lizard darted near my tires, and I swerved to avoid it.

We were in high spirits, headed for a swim in the river, when Gilbert suddenly stopped his bike and waved me forward. I pulled up alongside him, dragging my foot in the dust to bring me to a halt.

“Why'd you stop?” I asked.

“I almost forgot to tell you.” Gilbert took a breath and puffed out his chest the way he did when he had something important to say.