Waiting for Snow in Havana (27 page)

I got impatient waiting for Fidel to show up that day. Too much waiting and not much to look at, except all the people lining the parade route. The whole street was full of Cubans, two or three deep, as far as the eye could see. It was a wide avenue that led to the military camp of Columbia, west of Miramar.

Finally, Jeeps, trucks, and tanks began to show up, each and every one of them made in the United States. I'd never seen a tank up close before. They were sublime. Better than in the movies. Those cannons on the tanks looked lethal. And the noise they made was so beautiful. A deep, deep rumble that made the earth shake under your feet. You knew they meant business. And, best of all, the tank tracks left deep scars on the asphalt. You could see where they'd rolled, exactly. And you knew those dents on the street would be there for a very long time. Forever, perhaps.

How I wished cars had tracks just like those on tanks. Why not? Tank tracks and no mufflers. Perfect. You'd think that Americans would have thought of that already.

All of these vehicles were full of bearded, long-haired men, as well as a few women. Most of them carried weapons, and every now and then one of them would shoot into the air. And we waved at them, and they waved back at us. And everyone shouted, loudly. Cuban flags everywhere, on the vehicles, in the hands of the rebels, in the hands of those in the crowd. Fidel's flag—the red-and-black July 26 flag—flew from many of the tanks and trucks, but it was outnumbered by Cuban flags.

“Viva Cuba Libre! Viva Fidel!”

How great it was. How I wished that one of the bullets fired into the air would fall into my outstretched hand, which I held out like a farmer at the sight of a dark cloud during a drought.

Forget the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in New York, or the Parade of Roses in Pasadena, or the Bastille Day Parade in Paris. Forget them all. Phony, childish displays of crass commercialism and mindless patriotic drivel. Fidel's triumphal parade was the best in the history of the human race.

But where was Fidel? When would his tank show up?

Zip…Whoa…Oops!
Coño, qué mierda.

He came by so quickly, I missed him completely. I was there, and he rolled by on his Sherman tank about fifteen feet from where I was standing, but I didn't lay eyes on him. I saw his tank receding into the distance, over the heads of all the adults, but I didn't see the man himself. Not then.

I'd get to see him in person a couple of years later, from far away, at the Plaza of the Revolution, but by then I despised the man.

But that Epiphany I did get to see him on television. It was Fidel's first major speech to the whole nation. He stood where he'd stand hundreds of times later, perhaps thousands, at the base of the towering monument to the Cuban poet and patriot José Martí, at what came to be known as the Plaza of the Revolution, a vast, open space that could hold tens of thousands of people. Batista had built it, but Fidel turned it into the navel of his universe, the place from which he would fill Cuba with empty words that far outnumber all the black holes in the universe.

Tens of thousands of Cubans gathered around that monument to hear Fidel. The cheering and chanting were unbelievable, even on a small black-and-white television. It was sheer elation, overflowing, filling the land, ripping through the air like lightning. Even an eight-year-old could feel something special was happening. I don't remember the speech at all. What I remember is that one moment when hundreds of doves were released.

The doves flew in all directions, like hundreds of Holy Spirits descending on new apostles. One of the doves, a nice white one, landed on Fidel's shoulder. As he held the microphone with one hand and gestured with the other, the great revolutionary kept talking, filling the plaza with his words, the white dove on his left shoulder.

“Look at that dove,” Marie Antoinette said. “This must be a sign from heaven.”

Louis XVI, who was watching all this with a look of detachment and no small measure of suspicion, perhaps even déjà vu, said to his wife: “You'd better take a closer look.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at his shoulder, look at what the dove did.”

“Ay, Dios mío!”

“What? What? What did the dove do?” I asked.

“The dove took a crap,” said Tony.

“Now, there's a sign from heaven!” said Louis XVI.

This might have been a sign from heaven, indeed, that many Cubans missed. But in January 1959, Fidel seemed nice enough. I didn't even think much of all the people who were rounded up and shot to death on television. That's just what happens when you topple a dictator, I thought. Big deal. At least I've got some bullets as souvenirs.

“Preparen! Apunten! Fuego!”
Ready! Aim! Fire!

Those three words burned their way into everyone's brain quickly, along with the chant,
“Paredón! Paredón! Paredón!”
Up against the wall! Up against the wall! Up against the wall!

There must have been a lot of very thick walls in Cuba, because they never seemed to run out of
paredones
against which to line up people and shoot them dead. Lots of pock-marked, bloodstained walls in Cuba in early1959. The blood came off easily enough, but the bullet holes were harder to expunge. The bodies were entombed easily enough, or incinerated, or whatever, but the memories were harder to bury on both sides—memories of the crimes committed by Batista and his people, and memories of all the killing that took place under Fidel, in the name of justice.

But back then, in those early days, nothing important changed for me or for anyone around me. Batista's kids weren't in school after Christmas break, and neither were a few other kids whose fathers were close to the former president, the loser Batista. My least favorite bully was gone, the one I'd hit on the head. The parking meters were gone too, every one of them smashed by the people. But that was it.

So I went about the business of being an eight-year-old Cuban boy. I rode my “new” bike past old boundaries, and I scuffed it up as much as possible, just to get back at my parents for trying to fool me with that paint job at Christmas. I played with my friends and my bullets, set off firecrackers, taunted Blackie the chimp, and climbed trees. I went to the beach often and to church every Sunday. I saw new movies nearly every week and allowed Hollywood to claim one more piece of my soul with every visit to the theater. After seeing the film
The Vikings
that year, I began to pine for fjords, and flying axes, and all things Norse. I even got a plastic model of a Viking ship, and so did Rafael, and both of us stared at them for hours after we assembled them. I also kept scanning the clouds for Jesus. Every now and then, I still dreamt of Jesus at my window, but I also dreamt of beautiful blonde women.

I was clueless, but, then again, so was nearly everyone else on that island.

Except Louis XVI, who did nothing, absolutely nothing with the wonderful knowledge he had about things to come. “This guy's up to no good. No good at all,” he said when Fidel came down from the mountains. He prophesied our doom but failed to rescue us when there was still time.

We sneered at King Louis and his prophecies. The future seemed bright, even though the present was awash in blood. I did my share for the Revolution by pursuing lizards so I could wipe them off the island, perhaps even the face of the earth. They were so hideous, so base, the absolute opposite of Marilyn and Kim. And there were so many of them, these stinking reptiles.

If I'd had a chance, I would have rounded up all the lizards, each and every one of them, lined them up against a wall, and shot them all dead, one by one. I needed a lot more bullets, and a gun, but I'd have done it, for sure, if I'd had the chance. Preferably with Marilyn at my right and Kim at my left, helping me to finish up more quickly.

What do you think of these lizards, girls?
Qué dicen, muchachas?

Paredón! Paredón! Paredón!

Okay,
muy bien,
my blondes. All together, now:

Preparen! Apunten! Fuego!

K
irk Douglas stood tall above Tony Curtis, sword in hand. He had just broken Tony's sword, left him with a little stump of a weapon in his hand, slumped on the ground, his back against the wall. There they were, these two American Jews, playing Vikings in a Hollywood film, standing at the very top of a medieval tower somewhere in England, on the edge of the deep blue North Sea, their hair waving in the wind like wheat on the Russian steppes.

Vikings. Jewish Vikings. Sons of Jewish migrants from Russia playing Vikings.

And there I was, a Cuban boy in the Miramar Theater, the grandson of migrants from Spain, the descendant of Jews, possibly, watching this drama unfold in air-conditioned comfort while the tropical sun blazed outside. My brother Tony sat next to me on one side, my friend Rafael on the other. Manuel was there, and so was my father. I would like to think Ernesto wasn't there, but he probably was. A very nice theater full of Cubans watching this American film about tenth-century Vikings, shot on location in Norway and England, at a Saturday afternoon matinee in a suburb of Havana. All the others had paid to get in. We had gotten in for free.

Kirk Douglas looked surprised. Very surprised. He hadn't expected Tony's sword to break. The suspense was almost too much to bear. How long before Kirk ran Tony through with his nice, long, intact Viking sword? Go on, Kirk, what are you waiting for? Tony Curtis was already missing one hand. How could he possibly win? A stump of a sword in one hand, and a stump instead of a hand, wrapped in leather, at the end of his other arm.

Kirk stood there, hesitating. His blind eye, mauled by a hawk's talons at the start of the film, looked downright fiendish. It was Tony's hawk that had blinded Kirk. Tony had also stolen Janet Leigh from Kirk. Wondrous Janet, so beautiful, so desirable, had been won over by Tony. Janet loved Tony. They had even kissed already, in a sun-drenched, flowery meadow somewhere on the coast of England, on the edge of the deep blue northern sea. And Kirk wanted Janet so badly. Kirk was a bleedin' volcano, to borrow a phrase from Mick Jagger. Burned as hot as the core of the sun, Kirk did. You could see it in his one good eye, and even in the bad eye, all white and cloudy, which also radiated desire in its own warped way. This was the moment for revenge. The one chance to gain possession of heavenly Janet. Think of her eyes, Kirk. Those blue eyes, as blue as the northern sea, God damn it. Yours, all yours, for the taking. Go on, Kirk, stab him. Run him through. What are you waiting for?

A one-eyed Jewish Viking versus a one-handed Jewish half-Viking. No contest. How long could the suspense last?

Stupid Kirk. He waited too long. As he hesitated, Tony stabbed him in the gut with his little stump of a sword. Whoa! What a surprise! A guy stabbed with a broken fragment of a sword. Pure genius! For the first time ever, I grasped the power of inventiveness.

Kirk just stood there for a long time, looking totally surprised. His one good eye spoke for him: “What the hell just happened? This cretin just killed me with a little stump of a sword.”

Then Kirk keeled over and died.

The saddest thing of all was that Kirk and Tony didn't know they were half brothers. We in the audience knew that this was fratricide, that he and Tony were both sons of Ragnar. Sons of Ernest Borgnine. Yes, Ernest Borg-nine was a Viking too. Ernest had raped some English lady at the very start of the film. She had gotten pregnant, and given birth to Tony Curtis, who had been sent to a monastery somewhere in the British Isles. Then the monastery had been raided by Vikings, and, as fate would have it, Tony ended up in Norway as a slave of his father, Ernest, and half brother, Kirk. And then Tony's hawk had blinded Kirk, and started a whole lot of trouble.

What a great scene, that attack by the hawk. Kirk struggling against the hawk, the talons digging into his eye socket, the blood streaming down his face. And Kirk didn't even cry. Vikings don't weep or register pain, I learned that day. I thought them capable of plucking out their own eyeballs without wincing.

God, how I wanted to be a Viking. How I wanted to sail on a Viking ship, hold a Viking shield, wield a Viking sword, and cry out “Odin!” as I died a heroic death. Maybe someday I, too, would get to leap into a wolf pit, just as Ernest Borgnine had done, sword in hand, invoking the name of the chief god of Valhalla. Then I could have a Viking funeral, just like Kirk Douglas, my corpse set out to sea on an empty ship, flaming arrows shot from shore, ship and corpse set ablaze on the bright blue northern sea at sunset. A pale Nordic sunset, mind you, not a bright tangerine Cuban sunset.

Nordic fantasies in Havana, in 1959, as the Revolution enjoyed its first few triumphal months. Not much had changed yet, except for all the men who had been executed by firing squads. All those men, so many of them. It seemed there were thousands, and rivers of blood.

Paredón! Paredón!
shouted the mobs. Hard to translate. A
paredón
is a large wall, any wall against which you can line up your enemies and shoot them dead while they can't defend themselves. Get rid of them. Quickly, and with industrial efficiency.

So many Cubans were killed this way, shot dead without a real trial. I saw it all on my black-and-white television, under the watchful gaze of Maria Theresa and the Good Shepherd boy Jesus. The so-called trials. The rhythmic chanting by the mobs that never seemed to disperse.
“Paredón! Paredón! Paredón!”
The executions. Amazing, how quickly a human body can crumple and fall when hit by bullets. Amazing how long a man can writhe on the ground before the
coup de grâce
is administered to the head. Blow of grace, so-called, a holdover from the days of the Vikings, when cudgels and maces were used instead of firearms. Thank you very much, sir, for putting me out of my misery. Thank you for filling me up with lead, missing my heart, and then blowing my brains out. I must have deserved it.
Muchas gracias.

This was no war movie. This was real life.

But it was on television. And that gave it an air of make-believe, put it all at a safe distance. The men wielding the rifles were as threatening to me as the torpid guards of Ming the Merciless on
Flash Gordon
. And my attention that year was really focused on
The Vikings,
which I must have seen about ten times. That film was so much better than all this shooting on television. It was in color, and it showed you men fighting and dying up close. There was one scene where a guy was crushed to death by a battering ram, and another where a guy got shot through the head by an arrow. And
The Vikings
had axes, lots of them. Axes flying through the air. Kirk Douglas was so good with those axes. He could even cut off a buxom wench's blonde braids from across the room and do no harm to her head, neck, or body. All this while dead drunk on mead, or whatever it was that Vikings drank.

Years later, in Chicago, I would meet two girls roughly my age who had seen their own father dragged from their house weeping and screaming, “Please don't kill me, please don't!” He had soiled his pants on the way to the
paredón,
and begged for his life until the split second when the bullets ripped into him. These girls had seen it, lived through it. His crime had been working for the Batista regime. He hadn't killed or tortured anyone, they said. I think he had been mayor of their town. When they told me the story everything I had seen on television years earlier, under the care of Maria Theresa, seemed so different.

I didn't know it at the time because my parents shielded me from it, but I had a relative who ended up at the
paredón
too. And he had been as brave as Ernest Borgnine at the wolf pit, maybe even braver. Instead of invoking the father of all the gods, Odin, he had grabbed his crotch with his right hand, though his arms were bound around his chest, and shouted, “Shoot here first,
maricones!
Shoot this!”

That would be the Cuban way, so different from the Viking way.

Cojones
. Balls. Not Odin, father of the gods, King of Valhalla. Balls. My balls,
maricones
. Go to hell, you fags, I'm going to die like a man.

Too bad I didn't find out until I was forty-one years old. Knowing this earlier might have changed my life.

My father, the former Louis XVI, watched all this with a sense of déjà vu, perhaps even with ennui. Here we go again. Mobs, chants, trials, death sentences based on mere suspicion. Executions for all to see. Ho-hum. Interesting, how they use rifles now, and how television makes it possible for so many more to witness the killing. That square in Paris now known as the
Place de Concorde
never did hold enough people. So few, so relatively few were able to see me lose my head. Ho-hum, I think I'll go find some more stuff for my art collection.

The judge, my father, watched at home on his television and did nothing. I don't mean to say that he should have tried to stop the killing, as a judge, as a representative of the law. Only a suicidal maniac would have placed himself between the firing squads and their victims. This wave of executions was a giant
tsunami,
stirred up in an ocean of hate and pain. There was no stopping it. Everyone knew that. No, what I mean is that he should have thought of fleeing the instant the first bullet tore through the flesh of an
esbirro,
as Batista's supporters were known. It still makes me wince. He did nothing but buy more stuff.

He, of all people.

What was going through his head? The head he had supposedly once lost to the guillotine? Why didn't he pack up his whole damn art collection, find the first ship out of Cuba, and take us to the United States? Or to Spain, where we had family? Or even better, to Norway, where the Vikings lived, and there were no lizards at all? All I remember him saying on the day Fidel Castro rode into Havana astride a Sherman tank, was, “This is no good. Expect trouble. This guy's no good.
Este tipo es malo.”

A few months later, there we were, sitting in the Miramar Theater, watching
The Vikings
for free, as our world began to crumble. Hadn't he learned enough from that sorry experience in 1789?

We would keep going to the movies until the day we left. And he kept buying stuff even after we left, until the day he died. Kept adding to his collection until there was no longer any room left in the house for more stuff.

At least the stuff was there to keep him company. And Ernesto. He was there with him as he died. And he remained there as custodian of the collection and occupant of the house. You can't really “own” anything in Cuba, you see. The state owns everything—excuse me—the
people
own everything. So you occupy houses and take care of the stuff in them, even though it's never yours. There is no “yours” or “mine” in a Marxist-Leninist paradise. We hear rumors Ernesto has sold it all, piece by piece, despite the fact that he doesn't legally own any of it.

Funny, how I ended up with a half brother of sorts, just like Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas in
The Vikings
. The difference in my case being that I never had even a little stump of a sword to wield against him. Good thing, too, I think. Fratricide has a strong gravitational pull, let me tell you. That's why a fragment of a sword will sometimes suffice.

My father didn't have a Viking funeral after his heart burst. He was buried quickly at the family pantheon, and by the time I learned of his death, his corpse was already ten feet under ground in our marble vault, two thousand miles away from me, and his immortal soul was on its way to a new body somewhere else, perhaps already in some woman's womb. Maybe in Norway, somewhere near a fjord.

How I wish I could let go of the images I have of the death I never witnessed and the funeral I never got to attend, let go of what doesn't belong in the core of my soul, let go of all the passions that rule me. Letting go is a worthy goal, perhaps the worthiest of all.

Saintly Johannes Eckhart, Meister Eckhart, who was nearly declared a heretic in the fourteenth century for all the wrong reasons, had it all figured out. The only reason we suffer, he said, is that we are attached to stuff and to people. What you have to do is to stop loving. No attachment, no pain. So simple. So thoroughly German.
Gelassenheit
. What a concept. The Meister came up with it. It's what we should all aim for, he taught. The state of letting go. Letting-go-ness. You even have to let go of God, he warned. “I pray God may rid me of God,” he said.

Maybe a German can let go, in the thick autumn fog of Cologne, in the dead of a dim northern winter, when the sun barely shines for six hours a day, if it shines at all. But can a Cuban ever let go? Sorry, Meister Eckhart, it must be that sunlight. I love you, dear Meister, love you dearly, but that damn sunlight stays with you forever. It's burned into your cells. God is light, is he not,
liebe
Meister? What do you do if your very self is already suffused with the essence of God? If your memories themselves are rays of light from heaven? How can you let go?

Poor Saint John of the Cross, the Spanish Carmelite monk. Born Juan de Yepes, descended from Jews, transformed into Juan de la Cruz when he took the cowl. He enjoyed less sunshine than Cubans, but more than Germans. He tried to be German, like you, dear Meister. He tried so hard to be like you that his Spanish Carmelite brethren had to lock him up and physically abuse him on a daily basis back in the sixteenth century. He read what your Dutch and German disciples wrote. And look what happened to him. He wrote the greatest love poems of all time. And what did he say in these poems?