King of Cuba (21 page)

His mission grew clear. “I’ve come for the scepter.” Goyo’s voice squeaked like a choirboy’s.

The Satan fixed him with a stare. He lifted the scepter, and the spinning globe stopped. Goyo looked around him. Giants with halberds guarded the exits. As he lunged for the globe, the floor gave way and he dropped for what seemed an eternity . . . Through a slit in the curtains, the moon streamed its radiance into his eyes. Shadows he couldn’t account for marred the walls; whisperings seeped up from the plush carpet. Was he between worlds—a foot in this one, another in death? He worked up the courage to speak, to dispel the nightmare: “I am Goyo Herrera,” he gasped. “And I am still alive.”

The car was a Geesley or a Gasless or a Ghastly—who the hell knew?—and it was my rental from Havana to Trinidad. Every indicator on the dashboard was useless. The speedometer flew to 220 kilometers per hour with each tap of the brakes. Or hovered at zero. Or wandered, haphazardly, to other erroneous speeds. The fuel gauge stayed on full, so I had to guess when to put in more gas, which cost an outrageous five dollars a liter. According to the odometer, the total mileage for our ten-hour round trip was 13.5 kilometers. I’m not even going to talk
about the potholes. Or dodging the cows, goats, horses and buggies, chickens, vultures, three species of crabs, aggressive hitchhikers, Russian tractors, or rope-toting cowboys. Ask Pilar and Linda. They were with me.

—C.G., novelist

The helicopter noise was infernal. Even with his protective headgear, the chukka-chukka roar of the blades drowned out the tyrant’s every thought. As they coasted over the hushed decay of the Zapata Swamp, he spotted an alligator surface then dive beneath the mangroves. El Comandante used to take VIPs snorkeling along the magnificent coral reef nearby. The Russians had looked like sloppy lobsters with their flabby, sunburned guts. Today, the sky was glazed a porcelain blue. The weatherman
⁴
had predicted rain, but that fool couldn’t separate thunder from his own farts. Regrettably, he was the last meteorologist in Havana. The rest had defected to Miami.

The pilot flew low over the countryside, over its helices of palms and crumbling concrete huts that had replaced the sturdy bohíos with their thatched roofs and swept-dirt floors. “¿Todo bien, Jefe?” Captain Nicasio Correa was a stocky, hirsute man whose hairline merged with his wraparound sunglasses.

Inland, two old sugar mills still stood: the Covadonga, where his father-in-law had worked as a young man before siring the
ravishing Delia; and the Australia, converted into his military headquarters during the Bay of Pigs, then reconverted into El Museo de La Comandancia.
On this day in history, Yankee imperialism suffered its first great defeat in the Americas!
The tyrant had soothed himself to sleep many a night with those words, knowing that if he accomplished nothing else in his life, his place in history was secure. His mother-in-law, who’d lived in the area all her days, could identify every species in the swamp—pygmy owls and herons, water hens, purple gallinules. As a girl, Delia had loved to watch the crabs scuttle onto the roads and beaches during the massive spring mating frenzy. The crabs, she said, had made her horny as hell.

El Comandante pointed to a spit of land at the edge of the swamp. “Put her down right there, soldier.”

“But the President said—”

“I’m in charge here!” he shouted over the noise.

“Yes, sir.” The pilot landed the helicopter, as if on a bull’s-eye.

The rotting stench was overpowering. “Over there was where the largest concentration of enemy troops landed,” the tyrant said, indicating a beach across the bay. By the end of that first day, Cuba’s air force had sunk a landing craft and two transport ships, the
Río Escondido
and the
Houston.
A freighter owned by that Galician bastard Arturo Herrera was also badly damaged and most of its crew killed. Four mercenary B-26s painted to look like the Revolution’s planes were shot down; two more were crippled.

El Comandante gazed into the distance, lost in reminiscence. Diversionary tactics had forced him back to Havana in midbattle. Infuriated that he’d been lured away from the action at Playa Girón, he raced back to Pálpite. There he and his men came under artillery fire from the mercenaries’ stronghold in Playa Larga. Although antiaircraft batteries had recently arrived from Russia, nobody knew how to operate them. Their first attempt to take Playa Larga failed. His troops suffered heavy casualties, mostly from among the
young recruits of the Militia Leadership School battalion. But the impact of their attack forced the enemy to withdraw at dawn.

The tyrant was soaked with sweat, and the pilot fought off a cloud of mosquitoes. “With all due respect,” Captain Correa said, “we should push off or we’ll be meat for these pests in no time.”

El Comandante relived the acid energy of those long ago April days. El Duque, one of his most trusted men from the Sierra Maestra, had raced to the swamp in his Buick, an ancient bazooka in the backseat. Without orders he took charge of the eastern front and managed to recapture a village from the enemy before being captured himself. Brave men like El Duque no longer existed in Cuba. A year later he died of a malignant goiter. When the doctors tried to remove it, the hero’s head came right off with it.

“Let me help you into the helicopter,” the pilot offered. “They’re waiting for you in Cienfuegos.”

The tyrant climbed back aboard as the helicopter’s blades stirred a wide circle of cow lily leaves. Fernando had promised him a gaggle of starlets from abroad—Spain, France, Hollywood, all revolution-friendly places. El Comandante enjoyed charming these beauties, even at his age. A moderate dose of Cuban flattery translated to baroque devotion anywhere else. Before long they’d be feeding
him
chilled oysters from their fragrant fingertips. Yes, he was quite the master of hospitality, but the true geniuses, in his opinion, were the Arabs. Even the lowliest Bedouin in his blinding white burnoose welcomed a stranger to his tent with cardamom coffee and dates.

At the Cienfuegos airport, a crowd waved more birthday signs:
MAY YOU LIVE TO 100! YOUR IMMORTALITY IS OURS! HEROES NEVER DIE
! Who the hell came up with this shit? A swarm of elementary school children sang him “Las Mañanitas,” and a pixie with hair-sprayed curls plunked something out on a portable harp. The province’s best marching band followed with a mambo a todo meter. Everything in this godforsaken country turned into a dance party,
El Comandante thought glumly. Nobody wanted to buckle down and do the hard, anonymous work of building the Revolution brick by brick. Every last cubano craved the limelight, but there simply wasn’t enough room for eleven million stars. Just one.

I’m not beautiful, but I have what everyone wants: chispa. And talent. The ability to make you feel like you’re the only person in the room. To the writers, I ask: Don’t you have a little monologue for me? This isn’t an act, though I’m an actress. I’m pushing forty, but I’m still in demand for the romantic roles. My body has the curves, but it’s more than that. It’s something that comes from inside, something that you can’t fake. I’m lucky to be optimistic. You need optimism here. There’s so much that crushes artists.

Years ago, I fell savagely in love with a Chilean poet and moved to Valparaíso. That’s the prologue. Act One: He was very poor. Act Two: We had a daughter. Act Three: I returned home. I could’ve married a rich man but I fell in love. Why live if you can’t follow your heart? Everyone in Havana gossips about me because I’m a single mother and successful. Women envy me; men want to sleep with me. Now and then I let myself go, but I choose carefully with whom. Ay, that evening I sang atop the piano at Simón and Naty’s house was sublime! That sexy British actor was at the party. Gorgeous models orbited him, but it was me he wanted. And so we left together. The rest of the night—¡mi madre!—was beautiful.

—Olga Lobaina, actress

1.
Basso Profundo.
He says only one word to the ladies, one word that emerges from his endlessly seductive throat, a sound they can squeeze with their pussies. It’s a form of hypnosis, his voice, rumbling toward them like temptation itself, catching them for an hour, or an afternoon.

2.
Trabajito.
To catch a big fish, it takes a few fishhooks, not to mention other key ingredients I’m not at liberty to discuss. The target of my efforts has gotten too audacious, too arrogant. He makes fishhook paintings that sell for obscene thousands abroad. If you live by fishhooks, I say, then you die by fishhooks.

—Anonymous

3.
Towels are the biggest scam going in Cuba. I took a group of American students to Trinidad for a week, and on our last morning there, just as our bus was getting ready to leave, the hotel manager came running out to tell us that there were three towels missing from our rooms. “Go back and double-check the number,” I yelled at him. When he disappeared into the lobby, I turned to our driver. “¡Arranca y vámonos!” We spat gravel all the way back to Havana.

—Dr. Linda Howe, Spanish literature professor

4.
Ese tonto has been around since el año de la nana. I can say this much for him: he’s consistent. If you expect the exact opposite of what he says, you’ll be okay.

—Basilio Machín, tobacco farmer

Leave it to Fernando to suction all the fun out of a place. At the tiny Cienfuegos airport he strode up to the helicopter and made a show of stiffly embracing his brother. Then he whispered the lineup of interviews scheduled for the afternoon:
The New York Times,
Agence France-Presse,
El País, Der Spiegel,
CNN, Associated Press. The reporters had gone on a tour of Museo Girón, where key mementos of the Bay of Pigs—photos, film footage, weapons, tanks, even some airplane wreckage—were on display. Now they were eager to speak with the tyrant himself.

“No fucking way,” El Comandante interrupted with a forced grin. “It’s a press conference or nothing.”

“Don’t embarrass me, hermano. This took weeks to plan.” Fernando glared at him but scurried off to arrange the press conference.

The heat was unbearable, three-dimensional. The tyrant stood alone on the scorching tarmac, accepting floral bouquets from one pretty schoolgirl after another, each reciting a well-rehearsed speech he ignored. All he wished was to go inside, where it was cool and he could have a drink. El Conejo appeared out of nowhere (a rabbit out of a hat, como siempre) and escorted his boss into the terminal. Soon he was seated comfortably at the evacuated bar with a scotch on the rocks. Nothing escaped his twisted little adviser’s attention. In five minutes, El Conejo filled him in on everything he needed to know for the visit. He’d also dispatched an undercover agent to infiltrate the Bay of Pigs musical. The agent, a veteran of Angola, had been cast as a snapping turtle.

“A what?”