Telex From Cuba Page 4

  With no water to put out the fires, Daddy said we would have to wait for them to burn themselves out. The men kept on cutting breaks, putting down flame retardant along the access road, backburning, and we had to just hope for the best. At about five o’clock that evening, Rudy Allain came to our house. He was blackened from head to toe with cane ash. I couldn’t remember Rudy ever coming to our house before. Certainly not inside, as a guest. As I said, there was a pecking order in Preston, always someone to answer to. Daddy wasn’t Rudy’s boss. Rudy was a few notches down the chain. Rudy and his brother, Hatch, were different from us socially, you could say. Coarse people from Louisiana who knew how to handle workers. They didn’t live on La Avenida. Daddy had them in two brick houses down by the mill.

  Daddy and Rudy sat in the kitchen, talking. Rudy told Daddy the rebels had drained our gasoline supply, and there was nothing in the pumps. They’d done it the previous night, just before they torched our fields. Rudy said whoever had done it must have had keys to the shop. Keys to the fuel pumps. Known where the valves for the irrigation lines were in order to cut off the water. Rudy said maybe an insider was helping them. Maybe an American, he said, and then pointed out again that it had to be someone with keys. Hilton kept all of Daddy’s company keys on hooks in the garage, a label on each set. I remembered hearing Hilton tell Daddy that he needed masters to make new copies, that some of the keys were missing. That was right after Del disappeared.

  Daddy stood up from the table. “Goddamnit, Rudy. My son is gone, probably kidnapped by these lunatics. For all I know he’s lashed to a tree, eating bark, and you’re telling me he came down here and torched the town where he was born? Where both of my children were born?”

  “I’m not saying he started the fire, Mr. Stites—”

  “Then what the hell are you saying?”

  “Nothing, sir. I’m sorry if I implied—I hope the boy is okay is all.”

  Del was okay, and Daddy knew it. For starters, he hadn’t been kidnapped. He went gladly. He wasn’t on our side.

  The fire burned late into the night. From our upstairs windows we could see a reddish glow, and smoke backlit by the glow. The rebels had blocked our train lines and the road into Preston. Daddy was putting in calls to Ambassador Smith, hoping he’d get us help from Guantánamo. Maybe they could send a firefighting vessel up the coast, one of those things that pumped ocean water. But then the town transformers had to be shut down because of fire danger, and we had no phone line. Mother, Daddy, and I sat around with hurricane lamps going. Mother tried to keep the mood light. She knew how to handle a crisis, and she and I played canasta. What else was there to do? There’s something relaxing about that game. Bastista played it obsessively. Some people say that’s why his government collapsed. The rebels were taking over, and meanwhile he was at the presidential palace playing canasta, his aides standing behind the other players, signaling discreetly what cards they held. Annie made us cold sandwiches and we ate those while we played. Daddy paced and cursed Smith—he’d been warning the ambassador that all hell was about to break loose, but Smith kept insisting that Fidel was just a ruffian in the hills. The ambassador was out of touch with what was happening in Oriente. He’d come recently to Santiago, and his reception was about as warm and friendly as what those Venezuelans gave Nixon a few months after the fire, in May of ’58. Rocks whistling through the air. When Smith arrived in Santiago, the Rural Guard had been cracking down as a warning to the rebels. They’d killed a few students, and people were livid. That was his last visit. I think he preferred the yacht club in Havana.

  Rudy came back to our house later that night, to tell Daddy that all we had left in Preston for drinking water was the rain that had collected in the molasses tanks.

  The company never had operations in Haiti. Daddy said it wasn’t the right political climate for business. In Cuba, we Americans had our traditions, our own world. The company had a set of arrangements with Batista, annual payments, and in return there were no taxes, no tariffs, and we didn’t have to bother with the labor unions or any labor laws. We exported raw sugar, and nobody raised a stink. We sent our sugar up to Boston for processing, to the Revere Sugar Refinery. Batista came to our house. He and Daddy got along fine. I don’t know that they were friends exactly, but they had an understanding.

  I’m sure you know the slaves had a revolution in Haiti. A hundred years before slavery was abolished in Cuba, slaves were running the show over there. But instead of voting in a real government, those guys ran buck wild. Put jeweled crowns on their heads and acted like crazed despots, strutting around with white babies on pikes. But what can you expect of a revolution that began with the pounding of African drums, slaves communicating by voodoo? Bloody mayhem is what. Freed slaves running amok in generals’ coats with all the medals and the gold epaulets, and nude from the waist down. They gave themselves ridiculous titles: Chevalier, Viceroy, Generalissimo. The whole thing seems like a bad fever dream. French landowners wallowing in the squalor of their own destroyed estates, lying under the open taps in their own wine cellars, drinking themselves sick. I think they were happy to finally own nothing. Rule no one. Burned mansions, burned crops—the slaves in Haiti torched everything. Of course, slavery is terrible, and as I said, cutting cane is brutal, brutal work. But the slaves were forced, and that’s the difference. On some of the plantations the masters made them wear tin face masks so they wouldn’t eat the cane. Can you imagine? We let them eat the cane, I mean not as a policy, but nobody had to wear any mask. I’m sure it cost more to make those masks than to lose a few stalks of cane.

  Preston was eerily quiet that night. There weren’t any trains. Normally, I could hear them from our house, rolling through all night. I would lie in the dark and listen to that long, low whistle, and imagine the train’s round yellow headlight cutting a beam through the nighttime mist, which came in off the bay and hung over our fields, a floating lake of ghostly white. From the tone of the train’s whistle I’d tell myself, there’s the Number Thirty-two. The Number Forty-one. El Veintiuno, El Veintiocho. These were all steam engines, and I knew them by their sound. When I was much younger, Annie came to lie in bed with me some nights. If Mother and Daddy were at a cocktail party or if I was scared and felt like visiting with somebody, Annie came and listened to the trains with me. She knew them, too. All the servants did. The engine whistles were like voices, each one different.

  Maybe we should have seen it coming. It takes a while to put things together. You can’t always do it while it’s happening to you. A week before the fire started, the rebels closed down the main highway east of Las Tunas. That meant they had control of Oriente, so much of which was owned by Americans. Us, and the American government, who ran the Nicaro nickel mine. Batista was persona non grata with the Cubans, and we were caught in the middle. Fidel and Raúl, these were local boys, and I think Daddy was hoping he could reason with them. But after the embargo on U.S. sales of military planes to Cuba, that was in March of ’57, Batista put pressure on Daddy to convince John Foster Dulles—Mr. Dulles was a friend of Daddy’s and a stockholder and his brother Allen was on the company’s board—to find a loophole and get a sale of bombers through. Daddy did that, he spoke to Mr. Dulles, and they set up a pretty crazy scheme. Later, Mr. Dulles told Congress that the Cubans had received the wrong shipment—before the embargo—and the new shipment was simply making good on an old arms deal. Batista got his B-26 bombers. This was in the late fall of 1957. Del disappeared at Christmas that year. It was almost a month later, January 1958, when they torched our cane fields. Batista had been strafing the rebels with his American planes, and the rebels were furious. This is why they attacked us, because of the American bombers. Daddy’s deal with Batista wrecked Daddy’s deal with the rebels. These guys who started the fires, most of them had been United Fruit employees. We were the biggest employer in the whole region. The worst part was that Daddy’s oldest son was up in the mountains, getting bombed by American planes that Daddy had hel
ped Batista to buy.

  But we’d been through this kind of thing before. There was a revolution in 1933, before I was born, when they overthrew Machado. Mother and Daddy lived in Guaro at the time, a few miles inland from Preston. Daddy was superintendent in charge of agriculture, and the company gave him a house out in the country, right on the Guaro River. Mother and Daddy hid behind a table as bullets shattered the window glass. It was a good table, Mother said, four-inch-thick mahogany. She said they’d be dead if they hadn’t had such a fine table. There were troublemakers right outside the house. The U.S. government sent gunboats out onto Nipe Bay to protect the Americans. Mother and Daddy hid and waited for a skyrocket, the signal to get to the gunboats by any means possible. But no skyrockets went off. Sumner Welles, who was the American ambassador at the time, told President Machado he better leave the island, and the rebels called off the shooting. Mother said it was amazing. Just like that, the American ambassador snaps his fingers and it’s quiet outside.

  Months before that fire started, Daddy had already been shipping our mahogany furniture back to the States, piece by piece, but I hadn’t thought to ask why. I was born at the company hospital in Preston. Up to that point I’d spent my entire life in Oriente Province, on the property of the United Fruit Company. I was a boy, and it was my world. I wasn’t ready to give it up.

  2

  March 1952

  “But I didn’t know girls like you even had relatives,” the United Fruit executive said, shouting over the engine drone of the airplane.

  Rachel K had told him that her grandfather, Ferdinand K, had spent time near where they were flying, in northeastern Oriente.

  “What the hell kind of last name is ‘K’ anyhow?” the executive asked.

  She said she didn’t know. Maybe it stood for something, but she never found out what. Her grandfather came over from Europe at the turn of the century, worked on a plantation for someone called Dumois.

  “That means your grandfather worked for us. We bought out Dumois ages ago. They owned Cayo Saetía. There’s an old plantation house. We own it now.”

  “Just think,” he said, “your grandfather probably lived in the servants’ quarters of the Saetía place.” He shook his head. “What is the point of living your way of life, doing those…whatever you call them…Pam-Pam Room ‘shimmy shows,’ if you’ve got an actual lineage? A family and everything.”

  He gave instructions to the pilot. “We’ll fly right over it.”

  Her grandfather had come to Cuba to document the Spanish-American War, but ended up filming the hardwood fires around Dumois’ plantation instead. Forests of campeachy, purpleheart, and mahogany that were burned to make way for sugarcane, fires so magnificent and hot they cracked his camera lens. He decided it was safer to stay in Havana and construct dioramic magic tricks. And so he blew up the USS Maine in a hotel sink with Chinese firecrackers and sold the reels as war footage.

  A French adventurer, her mother had said, which didn’t explain why Ferdinand had spoken mostly German. He’d started his own film company in Havana, named it after Rachel K’s grandmother Irene, “Irene Fantoscope.” They had a scheme to advertise commercial messages on clouds floating over the city. It was either moronic or brilliant. Either way, it hadn’t worked. Ferdinand got syphilis and died. He left Irene with a small child—Rachel K’s mother—who must have had similar taste in men, because she, too, ended up alone and penniless with her own child, Rachel K.

  Far down below, the sugarcane swished, turning green or silver according to the direction it was blown, like brushed velvet nap.

  She’d been reluctant at first to go with the executive to Oriente. He’d always struck her as a person who was dangerous because he didn’t know which parts of him were rotten, or even that he harbored rot.

  “All this belongs to us,” he said, as they flew low over the green cane fields. “Three hundred thousand acres.”

  Maybe he wasn’t dangerous after all. He simply wanted a showgirl to marvel over his sugar empire.

  He’d brought along a half-full bottle of whiskey and plenty of ice. They drank it, the executive shouting up to the pilot every so often with instructions, then pointing out this and that to Rachel K. The company sugar mill, the company town. The company “choo-choo trains,” he called them.

  “You be a good girl and finish this up.” He poured more whiskey into her glass. The bottle was empty and they must have been drunk, but it was difficult to gauge drunkenness when she was sitting still, crammed into a tiny plane.

  “We toss the empties,” he said, “to test the soil. The higher the bottle bounces, the richer the loam. That’s how we know what to buy. Don’t even have to bother landing.”

  He insisted that she drop the empty whiskey bottle from the window of the plane. It was Dewar’s, she later remembered. Dewar’s White Label. She’d watched the clear glass bottle plunging down into the green. The executive claimed that it bounced, but she didn’t see anything. Just green.

  They landed at company headquarters somewhere along the northern coast, a place called Preston. Damp heat closed in around her, and sweat rolled down the sides of her face. “Not used to it, are you?” he said, grinning. “Humid, humid, humid—it’s perfect for the cane.”

  He pointed toward rows of large and ornate haciendas along the edge of a blue-green bay. “We live over there. She and the boys are gone for a couple days, shopping in Santiago.” He gripped Rachel K by the waist with both hands. “And I’m gone on hooky.” Without letting go, he told her, “I have to confess: I sometimes find myself wanting to stuff you in a footlocker.” And then he added, in a bewildered tone, “Why do I feel this way?” As if she might know the answer.

  She pulled away and skipped down an alley of bananas, a pale-green canopy of long, floppy leaves, taller than she was and loaded with dank and heavy clusters of bananas.

  She put her hand around the trunk of a banana plant and felt its cool pulse.

  “They’re full of water,” the executive called after her, “pure water.”

  At the airport in Havana where he landed his company plane, Stites—that was his name, she could never remember it and called him “you”—got her a taxi into town.

  He put his hand on her head. “Look, I’m sad, too, that our little trip is over, but try not to pout.”

  “Okay.” She assumed a pouty look and got in the taxi.

  She went home and lay in the bath, relieved to be alone after two days of performing the executive’s idea of her, that they were having an “affair,” as he put it, that she cared about his sugarcane. After her bath, she painted on her fishnets. Using a sable cosmetic brush and a pot of liquid mascara, she drew lines that crossed at angles to make diamonds, her foot lodged on the windowsill of her kitchenette. This ritual took several hours to complete. Like prayer, it was a quiet, obliterative meditation that opened up an empty space in her thoughts.

  President Prio showed up at the Cabaret Tokio that night.

  “You’ve been gone,” he said. “Handsome missed you.”

  Handsome was what she called him, a nickname, though Prio was not, in truth, so handsome. He was president and vain. They sat together in his private booth, decorated like a Roman grotto with panorama-print classical scenery, plaster figurines, and purple-leafed wandering Jew tumbling down the walls like ivy. Prio gave her an opal pendant and a silk dress with a secret pocket. She kissed his mustache and let him practice his speeches on her.

  He rehearsed his grand civic plans, announcing he would build a new Havana aqueduct, schools for the children in the slums, and a botanical garden open to the public, with a special aviary for African birds. This was just talk. Mostly, Prio liked to have a good time. The press ridiculed him for his expensive tastes: caviar, Russian vodka, fourteen-carat toilet flush handles. Photos had been in the newspaper of him and his prime minister, Tony, jumping over the sofas in the Green Room of the president’s palace, in pursuit of young girls clad in short shorts. They were taken durin
g one of Prio’s notorious “white” parties, plenty of cocaine for everyone. After the photos were leaked, Tony moved to Venezuela and started a construction firm. Prio went out only in dark sunglasses. His wife had black illusion veils sewn to the inside of all her pillbox hats. The two of them and the children got in and out of limousines as quickly as they could, turning away from photographers’ flashes.

  “How about a walk. An ice cream cone?” he said to Rachel K.

  She hadn’t expected a walk, an ice cream. She’d expected go to the palace Green Room and cooperate fully. But his tenderness—opals, dresses, ice cream cones—was part of why she liked him best, of the presidents she’d known. Not because he spoiled her, but because he could be embarrassing and sentimental, a fragile man who needed comforting. When the press rejected him, he sulked to Rachel K; his wife rejected him as well.