King of Cuba (4 page)

“They’re everywhere.”

“Listen to me. Have you taken your medicine?”

“The aphids took them.”

“Cálmate, I’ll call an exterminator. This is a problem that can be fixed.”

“Dad.”

“Sí, Goyito.”

“Do you believe in reincarnation?”

“Of course not, I’m Catholic. Mira, I’m busy right now. Take your medicine and I’ll call you back in an hour.”

Goyo checked his watch and hobbled into the master bedroom, which was lavishly decorated in his wife’s fantasy of an elegant boudoir: gilded chandeliers, mounds of tasseled silk pillows, brocade-laden tables displaying photographs, mostly of her, professionally taken and touched up, in silver-plated frames. Every inch of the walls was crowded with mediocre oil paintings except for the one Goyo had found, dust-covered, in a Guadalajara antiques shop. The painting turned out to be the lost work of a renowned Mexican modernist and was appraised thirty years ago for the princely sum of sixty thousand dollars. He’d thought of leaving this painting to his son. It might be less dangerous than cash or a trust fund. Goyo saw something of his son’s fatalism in the painting, too, as if he, like the skeletal conquistador on horseback, had long ago bartered away his soul.

Goyito’s hooliganism had begun even before his voice changed. At eleven, Goyito was selling marijuana to his fellow students and set fire to his school’s garbage cans. At the military academy in Pennsylvania to which Luisa had insisted on shipping him off, he hot-wired and stole cars. At the aviation school in New Hampshire, the only flying he did was from his shabby kitchen, the headquarters, Goyo later learned, of the sixth biggest cocaine operation in New England. Luisa refused to visit Goyito in jail then or during any of his subsequent incarcerations, the latest for a heist of household appliances—Sub-Zero refrigerators, stackable washers and dryers—from the Sears warehouse where he was briefly employed.

Goyo shuffled toward his office, leaning heavily on his cane. He was worried about his brownstone, a five-story building on East Forty-Fifth Street, around the corner from the United Nations. For nearly fifty years, the building had been Goyo’s chief source of income. But now it was collapsing, literally collapsing, its support beams rotting away, its hardwood floors buckling and sloping, its banisters wobbling. Its grumbling tenants included the convertible sofa store on the ground floor (owned by a crook who sold substandard merchandise), the Turkish restaurant on the second floor (run by a couple from Ankara who hadn’t paid their rent since the shish kebab incident), and the occupants of the six more or less renovated apartments on floors three, four, and five, most notably ninety-two-year-old Mary DiTucci, arthritic and stone deaf in 5R, who paid a rent-controlled $312.56 a month with checks written in a trembling hand.

Now this same building, his golden goose in Turtle Bay, was on the verge of crashing down on all their heads.

El Comandante rearranged the covers and surveyed his room, which was outfitted with two flat-screen televisions and the best medical equipment on the island. Essential tomes of history and political philosophy—Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Marx—lined the mahogany bookcase alongside a complete set of his Colombian novelist friend’s books, each signed and dedicated to him, including the one about Simón Bolívar’s last river journey, which was inscribed:
To the only son of a bitch who ever dared come close . . . Affectionately, Babo.

The tyrant was a great admirer of Bolívar, despite their tactical
differences. Who else had had the balls to take on a fractured continent and battle, indefatigably, to make it whole? No matter that Bolívar had died, disgraced and disheartened, at little more than half the dictator’s present age. It was his vision that mattered. How consumed Babo had been while writing that novel, employing a phalanx of researchers to fact-check his subject’s every fart and sneeze. El Comandante had grown jealous, believing that Babo should be writing about the Cuban Revolution instead of Bolívar’s fruitless efforts, and he’d waited in vain for his own colossal novel. That Bolívar book had rocketed Babo to stratospheric fame, cementing his transcendence from warty, toad-faced journalist to world-class literary prince and ladies’ man. Given the choice, the tyrant had learned, most women chose poetry over power.

Over the years El Comandante had entertained Babo in every way an esteemed, high-profile defender of the Revolution could be entertained—bequeathing him a palatial seaside home and his own cinematography institute, utmost solitude when he wanted it, first-rate company when he didn’t, and the best goddamn rum, cigars, lobsters, and pussy on the blue-green planet. Babo—el pobre was on his deathbed—remained loyal to the Revolution after all the turncoats had abandoned it like a love affair gone sour. When asked about his unflagging support for Cuba, Babo had famously retorted: “The Revolution might be a mangy, one-eyed cat, but it’s our cat.”

A cool hand stroked the tyrant’s forehead. For a moment, he pictured his wife forty years younger, surrendering to him after the long trial of winning her heart. Delia displayed the confidence of a woman whose presence had once made grown men collapse to the ground and whimper: “¡Sálvame, mamita!” She was in her sixties now, thick-waisted after bearing him four sons, but her essential nature hadn’t changed. To this day Delia girlishly pored over the Parisian fashion magazines sent to her by diplomatic pouch and
never once complained about the tyrant’s other women, or the children he’d recklessly sired (he despised condoms). She’d been content to stay sequestered inside their gated compound, hidden from public scrutiny during her most ravishing years, and devote herself exclusively to him.

“Mi cielo, how are you feeling?” Delia’s guarapo voice had a hint of sand in it.

“Like hell itself.”

“What is it, corazón? Tell me where it hurts.” Her face was pure concern, the space between her eyes creased like a scrap of burlap. But what could he tell her? That every cell in his body was flickering its last? That the pain began in his toes, snaked up through his calcareous feet, burned through the veins and byways of his legs, his groin, his belly, his spine? An unfamiliar tide of defeat rose in his chest.

“I don’t want to be old anymore.”

“Ay, to me you’re still El Caballo,” Delia cooed.

El Caballo. How he’d hated that nickname! The singer Beny Moré had pinned it on him like the tail on a donkey, and it’d stuck for decades. The tyrant permitted no one but Delia to utter it in his presence. He looked up at his wife and tried to whinny like a stallion—this had been their signal for quickie sex, rough and from behind—but it devolved into another fit of coughing. Carajo, nothing was more demoralizing than being old and sick. He grabbed Delia’s wrist. “I want you by my side when I go.”

“You’re not going anywhere, mi amor,” she said. Then she turned and ordered El Huele Huele to administer a double dose of her husband’s vitamin shots “to lift our commander’s spirits.”

The injection pinched the crux of his left elbow. The despot suspected that his caretakers were giving him more than B
₁₂
and magnesium infusions, but he’d stopped monitoring his health so closely. A pain in his chest cut off his breath, prompting another
round of violent coughing. It sounded to him like machine-gun fire. He took sips of water from the glass Delia held to his lips, then sank back onto his pillows, exhausted. Of all his infirmities, the incessant choking bothered him most because it interfered with his ability to speak. If he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t cajole, intimidate, or command. Why, in his prime he could’ve persuaded Jesus Christ Himself off the cross and into armed revolt against His Father!

His old rival, Che, had suffered from chronic asthma, and this had slowed down the rebels in the Sierra Maestra. Half the time, Che was laid up looking like a goddamn saint. At least he’d had the decency to (finally) die young and photogenic while “exporting” revolution to Latin America, thereby becoming the face of radical heroism. That photograph—the one of him in a beret looking beatifically toward the future—was the most ubiquitous image of the twentieth century. Fifteen years ago an anthropology museum in Los Angeles had exhibited its infinite reproductions: refrigerator magnets, T-shirts, designer handbags, flip-flops, even neckties. Add to that a rash of movies and biographies and Che’s myth was ironclad, larded as it was with lies perpetuated by the Revolution itself.

“What are your plans today, mi amor?” Delia asked, trying to recapture her husband’s attention.

“You’re asking me my
plans
?”

“Don’t get upset, I’m just—”

“How about staying alive?” The spittle dribbled down his chin, but his wife tenderly wiped it off. Long ago, she’d learned how to handle his tantrums: indulge him like a two-year-old, kiss him sweetly, then bring him rice pudding or ice cream.
¹
Delia slipped into bed next to him and patted his cheek.

“You’re my handsome boy,” she chimed.

“As handsome as Che?”

“Nobody, mi cielo, alive or dead, has ever been as guapo as you.”

How it chagrined him to have engineered that asthmatic’s canonization! By the time Che was executed in the jungles of Bolivia, he’d long outlived his usefulness to the Revolution. As an administrator he’d been a disaster, with no more diplomacy than a dung beetle. He’d grown cocky, too, refusing to stay in El Líder’s shadow. Che had needed to die. The despot had merely facilitated the conditions. A Mexican poet of vacillating political allegiances once wrote: “Tell me how you die, and I will tell you who you are.” Bueno, where the hell did that leave him?

The day he’d handed over the reins of power to his brother was the day he should’ve put a bullet in his brain. Not that Fernando wasn’t doing a creditable job, but the man had the charisma of a box of crackers. What else could you expect from a textbook Communist? Put him onstage before a sea of lights and he froze up, squeezed out a few scripted words as though these pained him, then scurried off into the wings. He’d never been good-looking either. Fernando’s features were artless, flat-bent, as if they’d been weathered down by the elements into a coarse Toltec statue. His eyes, though, were the eyes of a predator.

Unlike Che, Fernando had willingly spent his life as El Comandante’s sidekick. It was where he felt most at home: watching his brother’s back; eliminating those who would do him harm, real or not. Once in the Sierra Maestra, Fernando had thrown himself in front of an angry soldier threatening the despot with a Garand rifle. Now
that
was loyalty. In actuality, Fernando was the far more ruthless of the two. He never flinched when he killed anyone, and he slept like a baby. The tyrant liked to joke that, yes, Fernando
slept like a baby but a baby with one eye open and a twitchy trigger finger.

During their guerrilla days, it’d been Fernando who’d insisted on a zero-tolerance policy for infractions deemed punishable by death: stealing, raping, or disrespecting the peasants who were helping them at great personal risk. At the first sign of trouble, the offenders were as good as dead. During the first weeks after the triumph of the Revolution, Fernando also organized the firing squads that rid the island of hundreds of Batista loyalists. In the years that followed, the despot talked his brother out of innumerable more executions. Fernando’s greatest enemies? Poets. He considered them the most unscrupulous and degenerate of men and would’ve done away with all of them, if he could. Fernando couldn’t abide complexity. He was 100 percent macho, too, even in the mountains where the rebels had suffered long stretches of abstinence.

That was what Cuba needed, more loyal machos like his brother.

Did you hear the one about the tree huggers who came to Havana during the Special Period and ate their hosts out of house and home? In those days, street vendors were disguising scummy mop threads with batter and bread crumbs and selling them as fried steaks. Por supuesto, they were chewy, but you have to understand: people were starving. Other descarados were melting Chinese condoms as “cheese” for pizzas.