King of Cuba (14 page)

Excerpts from a doctored recording of El Comandante’s voice circulating in Havana:

Este es un país de tontos y de idiotas . . .

Un país grosero e insultante . . . y contrarevolucionario. Nunca en ninguna época ningún ejército en ninguna parte del mundo luchó contra un pueblo de cientos de miles de delincuentes comunes . . .

Este país es un asco, aunque sea bien grosera la palabra . . .

El sistema ha fracasado. ¿Quién tiene la culpa de eso?

This is a country of fools and idiots . . .

A rude and insulting country . . . and counterrevolutionary. Never at any time has an army in any part of the world had to fight against a population of hundreds of thousands of common criminals . . .

This country is repulsive, although that’s a rude way of putting it . . .

The system has failed. Whose fault is that?

The tyrant awoke in the middle of the night inhaling the verdant sugarcane.
²
It was the smell of his childhood, of the acres and acres
of swaying stalks, of the pealing bells calling the cutters to the fields. Everything had tasted of sugarcane then, stank of it; down to the coarse soap he scrubbed his neck with, down to his morning shit. Sugarcane had been his family’s bounty and its curse, a microcosm of everything that was wrong with Cuba. It’d brought slaves from Africa, destroyed the island’s forests, depleted its soils, and rendered the land useless for other crops. It’d made kings of a few and paupers of most, hurdled the economy through booms and insufferable busts. In the remote corner of Oriente where Papá had ruled over his fiefdom of sugarcane, his sons had been princes.

The hospital room gradually came into focus. Myriad tubes connected the despot to drips and computer monitors that turned his hands blue in the reflected light. How he hated this place! It reminded him of his near-lethal gastrointestinal troubles years ago. What was left of his large intestine was prone to infection, trapping food in its creases and folds, which bubbled out painfully at the slightest provocation. Sometimes the pain got so bad that the dictator swore off solid foods for weeks at a time.

The winds tossed the canopies of trees, casting wavering shadows against the walls. After a lifetime of insomnia, the tyrant could gauge the time of night as easily as he could the day. By the inky quality of the skies, he guessed correctly that it was a few minutes past four. The hour of grace would come just before dawn, when the night gave way to the stippled pinks of first light. Soon the morning papers from Europe would arrive along with the daily digests from Asia.

“Ssssst!” he called to the guards standing outside his door. Neither looked familiar, and this put him ill at ease. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Lieutenant Perico Rojas, sir!” The short, warty one snapped to attention.

“Captain Benancio Cuevas!” The other was lanky and rawboned.

“Are the newspapers in yet?”

“No, sir!” they answered in unison, salutes frozen.

“What the hell happened to me?”

“Happened, sir?”

“Why the fuck am I here? Have you overheard the doctors say anything?”

“No, sir!”

Carajo, these buffoons wouldn’t have lasted two days with him in the Sierra Maestra. Only once did the tyrant leave the mountains in four long years: to attend Papá’s funeral. El Comandante had been the most wanted man on the island, so he went to the funeral disguised as a Jesuit priest. He saw it all now as if neither time nor geography separated him from that hot July day: his chafing collar, the creaky procession of horse-drawn carriages, the campesinos dressed in their Sunday best, Papá’s mausoleum shaded by a copse of flamboyan trees.
³

All his life, death had pursued him without success. After the
Missile Crisis,
⁴
his enemies said he’d gone mad, that he wouldn’t be satisfied until he blew the world to smithereens. It infuriated El Comandante to recall the balls-cutting humiliation of the Russians’ betrayal. When push came to shove, they dealt him out and negotiated directly with the Americans. On the world stage he’d been discounted as a bit player. Difficult as it was, he’d survived that insult—and then he kept on surviving.

It’d taken El Comandante the better part of three decades to understand the Russians—not their psychology, exactly, which was the same for powermongers everywhere, but how to read them. Most of his difficulties stemmed from the language barrier and the interference of translators who, however meticulous, ended up complicating the proceedings. The tyrant was at his best one-on-one, draping an arm over his listener’s shoulder, offering a fragrant cigar from his private cache.

For him, the art of persuasion was akin to good lovemaking: rapt attention (however temporary), a few enhancing details (rum, orchids, fruit), seductive whisperings that paved the way for the royal screwing to come. Sex was better when a woman
wanted
to be screwed. One couldn’t just go through the motions. Bueno, it was the same with sensitive political maneuverings. It’d been a hell of a challenge with his ill-tempered Soviet allies. After untold hours of language lessons, El Comandante could utter nothing in Russian beyond a few basic
pleasantries. With six linguistic cases and the resulting infinity of verb possibilities, he could never tell who the hell was coming or going.

In the eighties, the tyrant had hired a gorgeous young translator—Cuban mother, Russian father—who’d spent her formative years in Moscow. Carmen Novikov was a fantasy pinup of cross-cultural womanhood: blond, blue-eyed, caramel-skinned with torpedo breasts and the most luscious hips on either side of the Atlantic. It was all he could do to stay focused on whatever negotiations were at hand. The lilt of Carmen’s voice, the zzzhhh of her consonants, the way her lips pressed together when she was silent, as if holding back the words corralled in her mouth, drove the tyrant to contemplate a different manner of revolution. Just once did he have the pleasure of nestling his chin on the perfumed curve of her shoulder to ask: “Lily of the valley?” Carmen had the good sense to slip away and pretend she hadn’t heard him. Eventually, she married an Indian diplomat while on assignment in Berlin and gave birth a year later to underweight fraternal twins in Bombay.

For El Comandante, the most frustrating aspect of dealing with the Russians was getting them to reveal state secrets. No matter how drunk or compromised their position (Cuba’s vaults were bursting with their lumbering sexual exploits, thanks to State Security), the Russians kept their mouths shut. Nothing was more alien to the island’s national character. That was why those braggart exiles couldn’t get anything off the ground. Put two of them in a room and you immediately got a conspiracy, or un relajo total. An hour into planning a commando raid, everyone in Miami would know about it, down to the abuelitas shopping for yuca at Publix.

From the early days, the tyrant had battled his own secrecy-challenged ranks with terror. In the Sierra Maestra, loose lips were dealt with swiftly, by firing squad. Fernando had convinced him of that. If his followers weren’t 200 percent behind him, they were most likely against him. To this day Cuban spies had infiltrated the highest ranks of the CIA and the Pentagon without blowing their covers.
A good number were retired with generous U.S. government pensions. The intelligence they’d gathered, e.g., who’d killed President Kennedy, Jimmy Hoffa’s whereabouts, et cetera, had proved invaluable for the Revolution as well as for the Soviets, who’d turned out to be as clumsy in espionage as they were in bed.

It was barely dawn when Goyo woke up with shooting pains down his back. His son was spread-eagled on the hospital bed, his left eye open and eerily flickering from left to right, as if reading an invisible text. El pobre exuded a foul, garlicky odor, most likely from all the junk food he ate. Yet despite his girth, Goyito seemed impervious to aging. Half a century of cocaine and buttermilk donuts and, physically at least, he remained imperturbably hale. His son should leave his corpse to science, because nobody, in Goyo’s opinion, had ever submitted his body to as much abuse and survived.

Goyo rolled his stiff neck from side to side but only succeeded in straining it further. Coño, he was tired of being old. In the natural world, dying was more dignified. When a wolf’s time came, there were no legions of money-grubbers trying to profit off its passing. The wolf went deep into the forest and surrendered its carcass back to nature. Since he wasn’t a wolf, Goyo had thrown his lot in with the Catholics for the same reason he bought Cadillacs: tradition, reliability, and the promise of running forever. He didn’t know how much time he had left, but he was dead set on outliving his nemesis. He’d settle for an extra hour, ten minutes, anything—but he wanted,
needed
that bastard to die first.

Goyo put a gnarled hand on his son’s sleeve. “Buenos días, mijo.”

Goyito’s closed eyelid fluttered and he smacked his tongue against his palate. Without a word he climbed out of bed, dug up a scroll buried near the twisted roots of the dwarf areca palm, and thrust it at his father.

It appeared to be a list of some sort, but Goyo couldn’t fathom its meaning.
What I believe,
it began.
That I can speak to dogs. That they don’t listen to me. That women are impenetrable. That children should like me.

Goyo hesitated. “Is this an assignment from Dr. Recalde?”

His son stared back glumly.

That the good things in life are bad for me: mothers, malted milk balls, cocaine. That there is a God but He’s ignored me. That a family awaits me. That one morning I’ll wake up dead and that will be without pain.

“What is this, hijo?”

“A poem.”

If his son had said he’d been moonlighting as a drag queen on weekends, Goyo couldn’t have been more surprised.

A nurse squeaked in on rubber-soled shoes, carrying a breakfast tray of oatmeal and pineapple rings in light syrup.

“Do you have buttermilk donuts?” Goyito asked as she retreated.