King of Cuba (10 page)

The tyrant’s eldest son paid him a visit just before lunchtime. As a teenager, Emilio had accused him of purposely stunting his growth, as if this were in the realm of possibility. In their primes, Emilio was one inch shorter than his father. Now with the ignominious shrinkage of age, El Comandante was five inches shorter than his son.

“So what’s going on in Iran?”

“You know as much as I do.” Emilio had suffered a minor stroke, leaving one side of his face paralyzed. It gave him a permanently discontented air.

“No detonation yet?”

“They’re awfully close.” Emilio had spent nine years in the Soviet Union (when it was still the Soviet Union) studying nuclear engineering. He was the island’s foremost expert on the subject. Puzzlingly, he also collected memorabilia from Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign, including buttons with the slogan
Sock it to me!
His brothers had studied engineering, too, but none practiced the profession. Estéban studied the mating rituals of Cuba’s painted snails; Enrique wrote god-awful, state-sanctioned poetry (his latest title:
Sepals of Revolutionary Love
); and Eduardo refurbished old Chevrolets for illegal resale to collectors abroad. What a sorry brood. If it weren’t for his wife’s interventions, he would’ve tossed the lot of them off the island long ago. Fernando’s children weren’t much better. His eldest, a dull-witted sexologist with the shape and demeanor of a Russian tank, got into constant, fruitless cyberscrapes with Cuba’s dissident bloggers.

“And the Israelis?” El Comandante asked. They’d been in lockstep with the Americans since before Batista.

“Apoplectic, as usual.” Emilio inhaled deeply. “Mami tells me you’re not feeling well.”

“So you’re on a mission of mercy?” The tyrant picked up the remote control and started channel-surfing. Europe’s economy was tanking. Another loco had shot up a U.S. college campus. Twenty percent of American men between the ages of nineteen and fifty-four were unemployed. Not a word about him, or his revolution. “The Empire’s days are numbered. You can hear the death rattle from here.” He pointed at the window. “Close that for me, will you?”

His son forced out the plywood and let the window bang shut.

“Tell me, hijo. Do you think things were better before the Revolution?” The sun streaming in the window warmed his bones.

Emilio gazed past the seawall, as if following a departing ship. But there were no ships at this hour. Nothing left the harbor without his father’s express permission. “I’m a scientist,” Emilio said, then cleared his throat. “I think some things may have been better before but . . . most things are better now.”

“What kind of goddamn answer is that?” El Comandante raised himself on one elbow. “If you’re bullshitting me, then what’s everyone else doing?”

“I just came to keep you company for a while.” His son turned his attention to a TV report about skateboarding bulldogs in Los Angeles.

“Come closer,” the tyrant rasped.

Emilio brought his face ten inches from his father’s.

“Give me one of your cigars.”

“You know the doctors—”

“Fuck the doctors! I’m asking you, man-to-man.” He glared at his son until he reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a Cohiba lancero.

“Just don’t tell Mami you got it from me.”

El Comandante held the puro to his nose. “Give me a light.”

Emilio handed his father a book of matches and crossed his arms. The hem of his guayabera was spotted with grease.

“Bola de churre,” the tyrant said, and chuckled.

“¿Qué?”

“Dirtball. That’s what they used to call me at Colegio Dolores.”

Emilio shrugged and left without saying good-bye.

El Comandante and his two brothers had started out as day students at Colegio Dolores, the exclusive Jesuit boarding school in Santiago. To save money, his thrifty father had boarded his sons with a Jamaican family—a widowed piano teacher and her unmarried daughters. The women feigned airs of gentility, but they barely fed the boys, forbade them from playing outside, and forced them to do menial chores, including massaging the widow’s arthritic feet. Abelardo, the youngest of the three, died of diphtheria before Christmas. By the end of that first school year, he and Fernando had lost a great deal of weight and their uniforms were in tatters.

It didn’t help that they were the illegitimate sons of Papá’s relations with their maid. At school, the tyrant contested every insult from his classmates with his fists, or by banging the heads of his opponents against the chapel’s brick wall. His most memorable dispute involved Patricio Charbonell, heir to a sugarcane fortune, whom the tyrant forced at knifepoint to the edge of a school balcony with a rope around his neck as the entire student body watched, dumbfounded. If Father Bonifacio had failed to appear when he did, Charbonell would’ve surely ended up dangling lifelessly in the sunlit end of the Jesuits’ courtyard.

El Comandante held up the forbidden cigar and licked it from one end to the other, deftly rolling it against his tongue. Tobacco was in his blood. His mother had been born to sharecroppers in the Vuelta Abajo. At fifteen she’d headed east to work, eventually ensconcing herself on Papá’s rural estate. Mamá became famous in
the region for her prized English roses and her ease with horses. The tyrant slid the puro between his lips. His hands trembled as he failed to light one match after another. Cojones. What man couldn’t light his own cigar? The hardest thing for El Comandante to imagine about death was the lack of cigars.

Finally, the flame held and the fragrant smoke filled his mouth, coated his nostrils and throat. His eyes watered with pleasure as he sank into sacramental reverie. More than doctors or pills or purgatives, this was what he needed.

In the distance, rotting under the sun, stood the Art Deco hotel he’d converted into a political asylum. For a time, it’d housed many of the world’s most notorious fugitives—Robert Vesco, Trotsky’s assassin, deposed dictators of every political stripe. But the outlaws had grown restless in exile, issuing too many demands on the Revolution’s flinty beneficence: coconut macadamia chip cookies, female bodyguards, Glenlivet single malt scotch. Power. None of them could live without it. The despot understood this better than any of them. Still, he’d kept the fugitives around so long as they remained a useful eyesore against capitalism.

El Comandante couldn’t have said how much time had elapsed before a horde of his minders stampeded into the room, waving and shouting and pounding on his bed. The flames had ignited his mattress and feather pillows, engulfing him from all sides. The smoke obscured the ocean view. Carajo, he’d set the place on fire.

Ooooh, I love coming to Cuba! The men here know how to appreciate a woman like me. They are not afraid of flesh. Every
time I visit, I pick up a sexy black
³
man. Look at my honey—isn’t he a beauty? I bought him that gold medallion around his neck. Mamita, he calls me, mi rusa preciosa. He loves the turn of my ankle in red satin mules, the waves of my breasts and belly flesh. Pareces una pintura de Botero, he whispers. They are flashy, these cubiches, but cultured. Of course, I know it won’t last more than two weeks. Do you take me for an idiot? The other tourists give me the evil eye when I bring my man to the rooftop pool, but I know they’re just jealous. Pasty, querulous couples who fantasize about us when they make love.

Here in Havana, dorogoĭ, I am the star of the show.

—Ivana Kuznetsov, Kiev jeweler

Goyo clicked on to the exile website for the latest news on the tyrant. El Comandante’s fever had spiked since early morning and he’d had another restless nap. For all the minutiae these morons collected, why couldn’t they simply inject the bastard with a lethal dose of something or other and be done with it? An all-points bulletin interrupted the news as usual: a double agent had set the despot on fire! How badly Goyo wanted to believe it was true. His housekeeper clattered into the office dragging a sloshing bucket
and mop. A feather duster was propped in the back pocket of her cargo pants.

“So what’s happening with the Old Goat?” Estrella had escaped Cuba two years before on a rickety boat piloted by her ex-brother-in-law. She was no fan of El Líder, but her bitterness was mere topsoil next to Goyo’s geological hatred.

“One of our own set him on fire.” Goyo sneezed from the stink of the ammonia. “He’s almost dead.”

“We’re all
almost
dead.” Estrella sniffed, then went off to clean the guest bathroom.

Goyo ignored his ringing phone for as long as he could before answering.

“Díme, hijo. Are you feeling any better?”

“I’m coming to see you, Dad. I’m bringing Rudy,” Goyito announced, and hung up.

Would this hell never end? At times Goyo prayed that his son would die before him; nothing terrible, a quick aneurysm like his mother’s. It pained him to admit that Goyito’s death might be a lesser tragedy for all concerned. The guilt he felt over his son was unending, an arterial suffering. Without support, Goyito would likely become a ward of the state, or be left to fend for himself on the streets. That winter he’d been homeless in New York had been unendurable for Goyo.

Perhaps if he’d spent more time with his son when he was growing up, taken trips together, things might’ve turned out differently. When Goyo was five, he and his father had embarked on a train journey from Honduras to Belize. Accompanying them was an Englishman with business interests near Chetumal Bay. Goyo spent hours studying the Englishman’s muttonchops and chewing the gum Papá dispensed to keep him quiet. For three days their train rattled through the jungle and along the Caribbean coast, past albino donkeys and chattering monkeys, past a village spit-roasting
armadillos for its midday meal, past a man with a square box camera photographing a squat, melancholy couple on their wedding day. By the time the train pulled into Belize City, Papá had secured the shipping rights to all the bananas and coffee produced in the region. Within six months, he would become a very rich man.

Goyo stretched his legs under his desk. His whole body felt bruised, pummeled, like he’d been in a vicious fistfight. Prokofiev’s
Peter and the Wolf
drifted in from the classical radio station. He’d played first-chair clarinet in the Jesuit school’s orchestra, and he’d loved the part—ah, there it was!—when the cat lunged for the bird and missed. Goyo pushed himself to standing, then spotted his cane lying beyond his reach on the white tiles. He was gingerly bending over when his daughter walked in.

“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded.

Goyo would rather crack his skull than endure her assistance, but he had no choice. Alina picked up the cane and clamped his fist around the handle. Then she informed him that Goyito had called again to say that he’d been pulled over by a state trooper and issued a $240 speeding ticket.

“How fast was he going?” Goyo asked, not really wanting to know.

“Ninety.” She extracted a handful of shelled pistachios from her shirt pocket and flung them into her mouth.

“The last time he was going a hundred twenty and landed in jail for a week. It took everyone I knew to get him out.”

“Maybe you should’ve left him there.” Alina’s mouth churned with nuts.

“Por Dios, hija, you know he isn’t well.”

“That’s been your excuse since forever. You’ve fucking crippled him with that attitude.”

Goyo was in no mood to argue. The quarrels with his daughter
left him depleted and resolved absolutely nothing. And yet he loved her. What else could he do?

“Did you hear that El Comandante is giving a speech tonight?”

“He’s not dead?”

“What makes you say that?”

Goyo tamped down his disappointment. So the son of a bitch hadn’t been burned alive. He was sick and tired of the false alarms. Coño, he’d better get busy. If Goyito was barreling toward him on the Florida interstate, then he’d try to welcome him like a prodigal son, Great Dane and all. First stop would be La Carreta to pick up some roast pork, black beans, fried plantains, an assortment of desserts (they both had a sweet tooth). They’d have a fine feast, talk warmly, familiarly, as if tragedy hadn’t struck long ago. Goyo dialed his mistress’s number.