Telex From Cuba Read online

  Before we had the fight, Curtis and I did everything together, built forts, made slingshots, swam in the river, rode our bikes out to the airstrip to shoot doves. Rudy took us down to Mayarí in a company truck, to buy fireworks and shotgun shells. Every Sunday the Allains had a huge cookout—venison, oysters, lobster, you name it—and I was always invited. They treated me like one of their own, especially after I found Panda for them. Panda disappeared on a Saturday afternoon and Mars was a wreck, wringing her hands and crying. Rudy and Hatch got a search party together. I remember them loading shotguns in the kitchen. They were convinced someone had kidnapped her, and they went down to the cane cutters’ batey, did a sweep from shack to shack to see if someone had her down there. They combed the town and no one could find her, a seven-year-old girl, just plain disappeared. But Panda was a funny child, not at all like the rest of them. She was in her own world, and I had a feeling she might have just walked off, maybe for a little peace and quiet. The second day she was missing, I was walking through the hump yard, along the railroad tracks. Just ahead of me was Daddy’s Pullman car, the sun glinting off its dark green paint, with yellow lettering along its side that said United Fruit Company. Daddy used it for trips to Havana. The company had the DC-3s, and Daddy could have taken one and been there in an hour, but he was old-fashioned. All the old United Fruit gentlemen were like that. Occasionally he flew, but often, when Daddy went to Havana, they’d latch his Pullman car to the main line in Holguín, and from there it was an overnight ride. The car was elegant—red velvet drapery, velvet upholstery, a teakwood-paneled office, gold faucets in the washroom, a dining room with silver, Wedgwood china, white tablecloths. It was cleaned on a regular schedule, and sometimes the cleaning ladies forgot to lock it up.

  As I walked along the side of the car, I heard this little voice through the closed windows. I opened the door, and there was Panda, hair all knotted and hanging in her face, that birthmark like a wine stain spreading out around her eye. She was singing and talking to herself, sitting on the floor playing with a doll, making it move around like it was talking to her. She’d brought a suitcase, and she had stuff strewn everywhere. She looked up at me. “We’re going to Havana!” she said. I told her everyone was worried, that maybe we ought to go see Mars and let her know Panda was okay. She told me she was sick of sharing a bed with Genevieve, that Genevieve kicked her in her sleep. I almost felt sad to have to take her home. Not every personality is suited to a family like the Allains.

  Curtis and I did a lot of fishing, and we’d give what we caught to Mars and Flordelis for the Sunday cookouts. Sometimes it was me, Curtis, and Del. Saturday night we packed bedrolls, sandwiches, and fishing gear, a radio set maybe, and loaded them on a popshot, which is a little four-wheeled open car that runs on the railroad tracks, with a lever to control it. You put the popshot in gear by pushing the lever, and there were pulleys that slackened to slow it down, and you had a brake. We’d take it down to the end of the pier, put out crab cages, and spend the night down there. If we had the radio set we’d listen to Clavelito’s show, for kicks. It came on at 8:00 P.M., and they syndicated it all over the island. Sometimes, at dusk, I’d ride my bike along the access road between the cane fields and the workers’ shanties. You could hear this eerie echo, all the radios tuned to Clavelito’s show, his strange high voice coming from the dark bohios. They had batteries but no electricity. Clavelito cured people over the radio. I mean supposedly. He made predictions on winning lottery numbers—that’s the other thing the Cubans were addicted to besides Clavelito, the lotería. Sometimes he played the guitar and sang. We joked about Clavelito curing people by telling them to put a glass of water on their radio as he spoke. Then they’d drink the water. But there must have been something to the guy, a charisma, because why else would we have listened? The truth is I listened all the time. Everybody did.

  The serious fishing was over at Cayo Saetía, and Hatch decided to organize a trip and take us boys. This was about a year after the Allains arrived, when Curtis and I had the fight.

  Saetía was a perfectly protected cove, with pink sand that sparkled like it had ground-up diamonds in it, and reefs that were teeming with sea life. You could stick a pole with a sharp hook on the end of it into the clear green water and pull out one octopus after another, lay dip nets, and when you dragged them out they were filled with enormous green lobsters. The island was covered with tropical fruit trees—mango, papaya, breadfruit, rose apple, soursop, mamey, flowers as big as your head drooping off the trees and vines. There was an opening in the reef to get into the bay, and boats could clear it only at high tide. It was scary going in, but it was the best fishing in eastern Cuba. Saetía was United Fruit Company property, and Cubans weren’t allowed to go there. Poachers tried to come in all the time. The company had a guard patrolling the bay to keep them out. In 1947, Fidel Castro supposedly swam several miles to the shores of Saetía, after an aborted invasion of the Dominican Republic he and some other Cubans had planned, in hopes of overthrowing the dictator Trujillo. I hear Raúl Castro owns Saetía now, that it’s his private vacation spot, which doesn’t surprise me. Whatever was ours, those brothers made a point of making theirs. Fidel still talks about Saetía and Preston and the rest of it when he makes his multihour speeches.

  We were all thrilled about the fishing trip, five days of living off the sea. Del stayed home, and at the time I couldn’t figure out why—I thought he was crazy to miss out. I’m sure it was because of Tee-Tee. He was always trying to figure out where she’d be and what she’d be doing. She definitely wouldn’t be over at Saetía, catching octopus with a bunch of boys, and maybe he hoped that with Hatch and the boys gone, he might have a chance at seeing her. I remember that Mother was happy that Del was staying, because Daddy had gone to Havana to meet with Batista. This was March of 1952. Batista had taken over in a coup, and there were all sorts of negotiations to figure out with the company. Daddy knew about the coup before it even happened. Deke Havelin, a businessman in Havana who was a family friend, sent a telex to let him know. The Americans all considered it a positive thing. Certainly Daddy did. United Fruit had a relationship with Batista—he’d grown up in a United Fruit town, had even worked for the company, and he was very probusiness. I think Daddy respected Batista, but it was difficult to tell how much Daddy respected anyone. He had a way of treating you like you were a very clever person, and then again a total idiot.

  Mitty, Curtis, a nephew of Mr. LaDue’s who was visiting from Missouri, and I all helped load the boat with supplies—rice, cooking oil, sugar, coffee. Hatch passed a case of his Methuselah rum to me and told me to be careful, and to handle it like it was a carton of hen’s eggs. We had three Cubans with us, an old guy named Perequín and his two grown boys. The sons rowed, and the old man sat in the boat chewing on his cigar—he didn’t really smoke, he just chewed on a cold cigar stub jammed in his mouth. Barely talked, but he knew everything about the sea. He and his sons guided us through the reef, took care of the boats, cooked for us.

  The first two days were paradise. We caught yellowtail, black grouper—we called it chedna—red grouper, strawberry snapper, and octopus, which the old man and his sons pounded on rocks and hung up on a line to dry. They chopped it into little pieces, boiled it, fried it, and stirred it in with a pot of rice. They cooked what we caught and served everything with fried plantains, rice, beans, and thick wedges of avocado. Saetía had once been a company orchard. Mostly citrus, but there were avocado trees as well, so heavy with fruit they were all leaning over. We ate heaping plates of food, and then everybody collapsed right on the beach. We slept on company sugar sacks, clean ones, laid over ficus leaves that we stripped from the trees. The second night it rained, and the Cubans put up canvas and we slept under that.

  There was an old United Fruit guesthouse on Saetía, near the main cove. When I was little we used to stay there. It looked like something from Savannah, Georgia, three floors of ornate, wraparound balconies. When we had importan
t visitors from Havana or the States, the company threw elaborate parties at the Saetía guesthouse. We took the seventy-five-foot company yacht over, the Mollie and Me, and if that wasn’t big enough, they’d strap a sand barge behind the yacht and tow the rest of the guests. The house had twenty bedrooms, beautiful mahogany and purple-heartwood furniture, a giant old-fashioned staircase with a curved balustrade. Crystal chandeliers, all the linens monogrammed with UF Co on them. A full staff lived in the house, just to take care of it. They had stopped growing citrus on Saetía years earlier; it wasn’t profitable the way sugar was. The fruit had to be shipped in air-conditioned containers, it was a small crop, and they didn’t want to deal with it anymore. For a while, they had just one Jamaican lady living in the house. Little by little, the company let it go. By the time we went fishing with Hatch, no one lived there. We still had our big company picnics on the beach at Saetía, and people would sit on the steps of the house for shade, but the place was falling apart, windows all boarded over. It was still painted United Fruit’s trademark mustard yellow, but the paint was faded and peeling, half the red clay tiles had slid off the roof, and porch floorboards were missing where the wood had rotted. Perequín said it was haunted.

  The door of that house was maybe twelve feet tall, and nailed shut. Our third day at Saetía Curtis and I pried it open with a claw hammer. There were little bats hanging upside down on the top of the door frame, asleep—the middle of the day is the middle of their night. When we finally got the door open, they stayed attached to the frame, hanging upside down like decoration, like those tassels along the bottom of a curtain. Curtis carried a flashlight, and we each had a twenty-gauge shotgun. I don’t know what we thought—shoot a ghost, maybe. The furniture was covered with white sheets, and cobwebs hung from every corner, wafting in the air that blew in through the front door. It was the same house where I had stayed as a little boy, but it wasn’t the same house. It had been a showpiece for the company, and now it was an abandoned wreck, the floor covered with dirt and mouse droppings. It smelled of dampness and mold and trapped air. There were beehives wedged against the hardwood beams of the dining room ceiling, and Curtis and I aimed our shotguns up at the hives and fired to knock them down and get the honey out. We put huge holes into the ceiling of the dining room, where my family had hosted formal dinners with the Cabots and the Lodges, the du Ponts and the Bacardi people.

  On a mild night in the old days, the servants made up beds on the second- and third-floor balconies, and we slept out there. I was maybe three years old, but I remember lying in an outdoor bed, listening for the watchman to blow his conch to announce a ship was coming in, which told the pilots to go out and meet it. They’d raise a flag, one or two flags, which told you how many ships, and how many pilots they needed. The head watchmen, Chatsworth—Chatty, we called him—gave me a conch shell and taught me how to blow it. Mother had it preserved for me in leaded silver. Chatty said that during World War II, he watched from Saetía as our United Fruit ships got shelled by German U-boats. We lost an entire company fleet.

  I wanted to see the upstairs rooms where we used to stay. “You first,” Curtis said. Beyond the curve of the balustrade we couldn’t see anything, just darkness. The smell of mildew drifted down the stairs. “I’ll let you hold the flashlight,” I offered, “if you go first.” Curtis didn’t buy that. We went up side by side, stopping every few steps to shine the flashlight around and listen for creepy noises. At the top of the stairs was a hallway, all the doors along it shut. I toed one of the doors—it wasn’t latched, and it swung open and banged against the inside wall. Light leaked in through the slats of the shuttered balcony. The room was empty, no furniture, nothing but a stack of newspapers tied with cord—ancient editions of the Havana Post, the pink pages faded to a yellowish-peach. Suddenly we heard a noise. We both practically jumped through the ceiling. It was just the watchman blowing his conch. We went into the room and opened the balcony shutters to get a look.

  The day was perfectly clear, no mist on the water, and from the balcony we could see out over the reef, to the larger, sparkling blue of Nipe Bay. There was a boat heading for Levisa—that’s Nicaro’s bay, where the nickel processing plant was. Whenever it rained, which it just had, the roads turned to mud, and no one could get past Mayarí up to Nicaro. Instead they forked left into Preston and took boats from our dock through the channel, past Saetía and into Levisa Bay. The nickel mine in Nicaro, which was owned by the U.S. government, had just reopened. The government built it during World War II, and shut it down when the war ended. They were starting it up again because of the war in Korea. They needed nickel for armor plating, airplane cladding, all sorts of munitions. It was a serious operation, and a bunch of Americans were coming over to run it.

  The boat passing by was filled with people, American-looking in their fancy travel clothes, ladies in white cotton gloves, and kids who had that fussy Sears catalog look about them, all of them pale as ghosts. One woman had a nervous little dog in her lap that kept yapping at the oarsmen, the oarsmen laughing back at the little dog like it was the stupidest thing they’d ever seen. “Yap yap yap!” Its little bark echoed across the bay. I said I’d heard they were all coming over to work in Nicaro.

  “Another boatload of losers,” Curtis said. He started carrying on about people coming to Cuba once they’ve screwed things up at home. He said people used to move West in frontier times when they’d screwed up, got a bad reputation, or had trouble with the law. Go to a new town, the next county over, where no one knew them. “Now they just come here,” he said.

  “Maybe some people like it better over here, and that’s why they come,” I said.

  “You telling me all these Americans move here because they want to? To live with a bunch of niggers on the edge of a swamp?”

  “I was born here, Curtis. My father’s been here since he graduated from agriculture school. He moved my mother over. It’s our home.”

  “Uncle Rudy says it’s a loser’s paradise.”

  “I don’t know what losers he’s talking about. My father’s not a loser.”

  “Not here he ain’t,” Curtis said. “He’s el jefe. The big boss. Like Uncle Rudy says: if you can’t serve in heaven, might as well rule in hell.”

  “Just because your father killed someone”—I’d never said a word to Curtis about Hatch’s murder rap, it just came out—“doesn’t mean everyone around here is a fugitive. That’s your family.”

  “How do you know what your father did before he moved here? Maybe he knocked up some girl, a cousin or something, and he had to scram—”

  That’s when I punched him. It’s possible I knocked him out with one punch. Curtis fell back and landed on the balustrade of the balcony, and the balustrade must have been rotten because it gave way. He pitched off the balcony, backward. I leaned over the edge, panicked, and almost fell off myself. He’d dropped two stories. Landed flat on his back on the sandy ground. I hadn’t meant to hit him so hard. I knew how to box, and hitting hard came naturally. The Cubans had a boxing ring set up in the cockfighting round when it wasn’t cockfighting season, and I went down there and sparred. They had a guy from the mill, Luís Galindez, who coached me and Del. Later, when I went to military academy, I was on the boxing team and everyone called me Cuba, Cuba Stites.

  I ran down the hall, took the main stairs to the foyer two at a time, flew through the lobby and past all that sheet-draped furniture, raising dust and sending that damp, moldy smell up to my nose. The front door was open and light flooded in, so bright I couldn’t see a thing, light flooding through like it was a door into heaven. The inside of the house felt like a completely different world than the one outside—different light, a different climate—much cooler, and the sound of the ocean muted through the boarded windows. I remembering hoping that when I got outside, I wouldn’t have punched Curtis, and he wouldn’t have fallen two stories off the balcony, like it was just a nightmare dreamed up by the house. Maybe that’s what Perequín mea
nt when he said it was haunted, a place that lets your imagination run wild, or where you end up accidentally pitching another kid off a balcony.

  Curtis’s face was covered with blood, and he was out cold, either from the punch or from the fall, or maybe both. I shouted for help. Hatch and Perequín came running over. Hatch was calm. He asked me what happened, picked up Curtis, and carried him down to the shore. I wish I wouldn’t have seen it, but Curtis peed in his pants in Hatch’s arms. I guess that’s what happens when the body’s in shock and you’re unconscious. Hatch laid him down in one of the boats, and we set off for Preston, to take him to the company hospital. Perequín was whispering Hail Marys and shaking his head while he rowed. He said it was the house, that he knew there was trouble inside. Hatch had a balled-up shirt pressed to Curtis’s nose, to try to stop the bleeding. Hatch said, “Son, wake up. Can you hear me? Son?” Curtis’s eyes fluttered. Hatch shook him gently. Curtis finally came-to. He opened his eyes, sat up, and started swinging at me like a wild man. Hatch pinned him down. “Hey, hey, easy, Curtis. You better just rest.” Curtis closed his eyes. He was out cold again.

  We had him under Doctor Romero’s care in maybe an hour. Curtis woke up, and Doctor Romero said he seemed okay, that he had a concussion and they would monitor him for a few days to make sure there was nothing seriously wrong. Dr. Romero said that he weathered the fall because he was a kid and flexible and strong. His nose wasn’t broken; faces just bleed a lot, this I know from boxing.

  While Curtis was in the hospital, I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened and what he’d said about the Americans going to Nicaro. I started wondering if maybe people did come to Cuba because they had to, because they’d failed in some way at home and needed to escape this or that fate. Hatch Allain killed a man with his bare hands—that’s what everybody said. But whether or not you actually committed a crime, moving to another country meant getting away from all the people who had decided what kind of person you were and how you were supposed to live your life. Like Panda moving into Daddy’s Pullman car, except Panda hadn’t done anything wrong. She just wanted a fresh start, away from her family. But let’s say you had done something wrong, committed a crime. A fresh start in a place like Cuba meant you could be wanted by the law at home, and it wouldn’t matter because you were under a different set of laws. Not Cuba’s laws. You were under the company’s laws.