King of Cuba (15 page)

Goyo pulled out his cell phone and dialed Alina’s number. She picked up on the third ring.

“Jesus, it’s six in the morning.”

“We’re done here.”

“That goddamn dog chewed two legs off the dining room table. I forced him out on the balcony, but he howled at the moon for hours.”

“Come and get us, hija,” Goyo said. “Your brother and I are going to New York.”

1.
It hadn’t rained in weeks when the mother of all thunderstorms hit. Rain slashed our village, then big chunks of hail fell like God Himself was throwing stones at us from heaven. My two chickens were too stupid to run for cover, so I dashed out to look for them and found them dazed, one of them bloody, under Violeta, my neighbor’s cow. I rescued them and ran like hell through the mud, holding my gallinas close all the way home.

—Heriberto Montuyo, campesino

2.
What you see here in Trinidad was once the heart of the sugarcane industry. I treat these old mills as archaeological sites and excavate evidence of the lives lived—and lost—inside their boundaries. It’s my life’s work, but I’ve been slowing down on account of my Parkinson’s. The medicines knock me out, and I’m good for maybe two hours a day. The rest of the time, I shake like a leaf. Nobody’s interested in my research anymore. What my students want more than anything is to get as far away from here as possible, away from the sugarcane that predetermined their lives.

—María Estela Arza, historian

3.
The flamboyans call to me with their outlandish orange blossoms. How I’d love to climb in one and stay forever, like the count in that Italian novel I love. Now and then, I’d lower a tin bucket for books and Serrano ham, but mostly I’d just watch the pageantry of this vibrant, decaying city. As I write, the Revolution is in its last gasp. What will come after, nobody knows.

—Cristina García, novelist

4.
Q
: Did you know there’s no mention of the Missile Crisis at the Museo de la Revolución or in Cuba’s history books?
A
: What missile crisis?

TROPICAL FORECAST: The threat of heavy rain continues. A tropical storm warning is in effect for the eastern part of the island. Maximum sustained winds are near 65 kilometers with higher gusts up to 165. Dangerous waves will persist in the north and south-central coasts. I don’t know about you, but I’m staying home to watch the latest episode of
Gaucho Love
. Como siempre . . . el último meteorólogo en La Habana.

It was long past midnight and the tyrant couldn’t sleep, not a wink. It was a wonder he hadn’t suffered another intestinal attack after the knockdown fight with his brother. Fernando had revealed—with surprising nonchalance—that the impending Bay of Pigs reenactment had been transformed into a goddamn musical. No planes, no beach landings, no decisive battles against the mercenaries. Not only was it a musical but it was now in the hands of a gay theater director who’d publicly denounced the regime. This was burlesque, pure grotesquerie! The remains of a birthday hat and ripped tissue paper lay strewn near his bed. Delia had given him his birthday gift early: a ludicrous child’s telescope, ill-suited for anything but voyeurism.

El Comandante lit a Cohiba. After nearly self-immolating last month, he’d given up all pretense of giving up cigars. Now he
smoked three or four daily and didn’t give a damn what anybody thought. He balanced the puro between his thumb and forefinger as he tottered along the foot of his bed. The smoke engulfed his leonine head, penetrated his beard, the deadly expression in his eyes. His anger toward Fernando surged anew. Did his brother think him a fool? He should never have trusted him again after he’d pissed away three million dollars on that joint-venture zombie movie. Fernando still defended the film, insisting that the flesh-eating zombies were supposed to be Yankee-backed dissidents trying to destabilize the country. What did he care that nobody understood the social satire? They’d been laughed out of every film festival on the planet, including Karachi’s.

The tyrant sat at the edge of his bed and looked down at his bare feet. They were thickly veined, the skin dry and cracked. A blood clot adorned his big left toe like a garnet. To think that he’d once marched for days on the pads of his once-sturdy soles. At his peak, he’d known omnipotence, a holy opprobrium. Now it was zombies and queer theater directors, insurrection on all fronts. How could he possibly leave the Revolution in the hands of these imbeciles? Revolution and art, he’d decided long ago, were fundamentally incompatible.

To cancel the stupid musical would be to risk public humiliation, something the regime couldn’t afford. On the other hand, he couldn’t permit Fernando to blatantly undermine his authority. El Comandante had demanded a historically authentic invasion, complete with vintage B-52 bombers, mercenary boats, and a cast of thousands. The extravaganza would dazzle their international guests and ensure that the Revolution’s version of events survived. Now what the hell did he have to look forward to on his birthday?

He called El Conejo. “I want to see the dolphins,” he ordered. Visiting them always calmed him down.

“A sus órdenes, Jefe. When should I arrange a visit?”

“Immediately.”

“Immediately?”

“Do I need to use profanity?”

“I’ll come for you shortly.”

The tyrant savored the moment. His whim would ruin the nights of a dozen or so of his minions. It was useful to test their loyalty now and then, though he’d learned from experience that the most publicly loyal were also the most likely to betray. But if the commander in chief—the hell with Fernando,
he
was still in charge—wanted to visit the aquarium at two in the morning, so be it. Twenty minutes later, he was climbing the steps to the dolphin house. A group of underlings accompanied him: the youngest of his personal physicians (on probation for trafficking in antibiotics); the ministers of the interior and agriculture; three veterinarians, including an expert on cetaceans; and a couple of comemierda generals.

El Comandante entered the ultramarine room and waited for a bodyguard to adjust his portable leather chair. He would much rather spend his days right here in the aquarium than in the stifling, modernist house his wife had insisted on filling with backbreaking Danish furniture. There wasn’t so much as a footstool in the whole damn place. The tyrant swiveled to face the gigantic tank. Once he’d dreamt of capturing a two-hundred-ton blue whale and putting it on display in Havana, but experts had quickly dissuaded him. Blue whales were an endangered species, and their size made them next to impossible to capture. Besides, to look into a blue whale’s eye, they said, into its great wink of eternity, could drive a sane man to madness.

The dolphins sidled up to the glass to gaze, brine-eyed, at their most ardent fan.

“Start the show,” El Comandante barked.

The lights dimmed, and a trio of lithe divers—two men and
a bespangled woman with chapped, forlorn feet—slipped into the water wearing wet suits but no diving equipment. The divers worked in close harmony with the dolphins, gracefully kaleidoscoping into hearts, spirals, and hexagons to the gyrating rhythms of Los Van Van’s greatest hits. Their routines reminded the tyrant of those old Hollywood movies with the swimming starlet Esther Williams (he’d had a crush on her as a young man), except that this music and choreography were far superior.

After a difficult series of jumps and twists, one of the dolphins nuzzled the female diver and waggled its prodigious tail. The dictator clapped his hands in delight. “Ha, that’s a new one!”

Everyone present breathed a sigh of relief. With any luck, no one would be upbraided tonight; no one dismissed, or incarcerated for real or imagined crimes.

“That one’s getting fat,” El Comandante said, singling out the dolphin named Betty. Recently, he’d resuscitated the Revolution’s fitness-for-all campaign from the dark ages. Nobody embraced the idea, least of all Cuba’s gym teachers, who were as overweight and underaerobicized as everybody else.

One of the veterinarians, a doleful fellow with concave cheeks, stepped forward. “She’s pregnant, Comandante,” Dr. Gutiérrez explained, clicking his rubber heels.

The tyrant brought his hands together, fingertips touching. “Is she in your charge?”

“Sí, Comandante.” Dr. Gutiérrez blushed to the tips of his ears, as if it were he who’d impregnated the sorry creature and was now facing her father’s wrath.

“Where was her chaperone, eh?”

Everyone remained silent. Mistaking El Comandante’s intentions had proved a fast path to oblivion, or worse.

“¡Idiotas!” he burst out, laughing.

The divers energetically resumed their routine, rushing a few
backflips. During the finale, the errant Betty torpedoed around the gigantic tank, coquettishly flapping her tail. It seemed to the tyrant—and he was never wrong about such things—that the bitch only had eyes for him.

No sooner had the dictator returned from the aquarium than the morning’s troubles resumed in full force. The crashing euro meant fewer tourists and trade. Imports to Cuba had fallen 37 percent, ravaging the economy. For months, headlines around the world had been proclaiming the death of the Revolution. Fernando’s attempt to lay off more government workers had backfired. Protests were breaking out in Guantánamo and other cities that the army couldn’t fully contain. By every conceivable measure, it was all a fiasco. Only in Cuba, El Líder thought miserably, did citizens expect to survive without working—and moreover, feel entitled to not working.

He rang for his breakfast: oatmeal, stewed fruit, multigrain toast that tasted like sawdust. Today was his birthday, goddamnit, so he demanded a cafecito
¹
and heaped in six teaspoons of sugar. More bad news. There was a record rice shortage in Asia. Cuba’s sugarcane harvest was expected to be worse than last year’s. The ever-optimistic
Granma
printed the schedule of festivities to be held in honor of the tyrant’s eighty-ninth birthday—parades in Holguín and Camagüey; a dance festival in Trinidad; a workers’ rally on the steps of the Capitol at noon; and, most infuriatingly, the premiere of
Bay of Pigs: The Musical!
in Cienfuegos.

That he didn’t already have Fernando’s head on a platter over this abomination attested to his weakness. It was impossible to fight everyone at once. If only he could be like that Bruce Lee, kickboxing his way through a hundred men. Early on in the Revolution, the tyrant had battled his own family first to mute criticism of his policies. Papá’s hacienda was nationalized before any others. His cousin’s sugar refinery was handed over to its workers. After the Revolution took control of the banks, his mother publicly criticized him for displaying “bad manners,” adding: “This is not how I raised my son.” The tyrant couldn’t make her understand that when it came to building a nation, niceties were not a priority.

Besides, next to the Soviets he was a model of civility. For years El Comandante had endured their endless, vodka-fueled banquets—everyone two-fistedly shoveling in heaps of caviar, sturgeon, sheep’s-cheese sandwiches, balyk (the highly prized dorsal sections of salted or smoked salmon), and those beastly pies, heavy enough to use as artillery shells. What the hell were those pies called? Kulo-something-or-other. Kulo-ban-skas. No, no. Kulebyakas. That was it. Colossal, stupefying pies stuffed with oily fish, congealed meats, cabbage. How he hated that stinking sour cabbage! Like eating out of a urinal. Kitchen sink pies. Why, he’d half-expected to find wrenches or chunks of farm machinery between their leaden crusts. His stomach, at least, had been ironclad then.

Once, the tyrant had so mangled a toast in Russian that it sent his Kremlin cronies—with their galoshes and greatcoats and dull, barking basses—into paroxysms of laughter. He’d meant to say: “I salute, with fervor, the young men and women of great Mother Russia, whose future in this land is bright.” Instead it came out: “May the lamb-clad maidens of Mother Russia enjoy their bright morning sprats.” Oh, everyone laughed heartily over that one. The mirthless wives with their heaving acreage of breasts. The snubnosed
state accordionist, who doubled over with tears in his eyes and stopped playing for a full five minutes. The foreign minister joked: “Our Cuban friend knows as much about Russia as a pig knows about oranges.” More ah-ha-ha! El Comandante never attempted to say anything in Russian again.

Outside his window, dawn slowly dissolved into day. A squadron of pelicans flew close to shore, dive-bombing the surf for fish. How he would love nothing more than to spend the day fishing like them. A cramp tightened his belly. He winced and shouted for an attendant. An unfamiliar, goggle-eyed man in a pin-striped suit answered his call. The tyrant’s sphincter froze.

“Who the hell are you?” he said, balking.

“Compañero Vásquez.”

“You’re no compañero of mine. Where the hell did you get that suit?”

“It’s the one you wore for the Pope’s visit. How handsome you looked. The ladies flocked to you anew.”