. You know, where that sick bastard throws boiling hot coffee in her face.” “Didn’t see it. Last film I saw was Peter Pan
.” We both turned around as a white Oldsmobile came up the drive. It had a sun visor and whitewall tires and sounded like the motor bus to Santiago. “Damn,” said Noreen. “That’s Alfredo.” The white Olds was followed by a two-door red Buick. “And, it looks like, the rest of my guests.”
5 T
HERE WERE EIGHT OF US FOR DINNER. Dinner was prepared and served by Ramón, Hemingway’s Chinese cook, and René, his Negro butler, which only I seemed to find amusing. It certainly wasn’t because I had anything against the Chinese or Negroes. But it struck me as ironic that Noreen and her guests were all solemnly prepared to avow their communism while other men did all the work. There was no denying what Cuba and its people had suffered, first at the hands of the Spanish, then the Americans, and then the Spanish again. But as bad as any of these perhaps had been the Cuban governments of Ramón Grau San Martín and now Fulgencio Batista. Formerly a sergeant in the Cuban army, F.B.—as most of the Europeans and Americans in Cuba called him—wasn’t much more than an American puppet. So long as he danced to Washington’s tune, American support seemed likely to continue, no matter how brutishly his regime behaved. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to believe that a totalitarian system of government in which a single authoritarian party controls the state-owned means of production was, or ever could be, the answer. And I said as much to Noreen’s left-leaning guests: “I think communism’s a much greater evil to inflict upon this country than anything that could be conceived and administered by a minor despot like F.B. A small-time thug like him might inflict a few individual tragedies. Perhaps several. But it hardly begins to compare with the rule of genuine tyrants like Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. They’ve been the manufacturers of national tragedies. I can’t speak for all the Iron Curtain countries. But I know Germany pretty well, and you can take it from me that the working classes of the GDR would love to change places with the oppressed peoples of Cuba.” Guillermo Infante was a young student who had just been kicked out of the Havana University School of Journalism. He had also served a short sentence for writing something in a popular opposition magazine called Bohemia
. This prompted me to point out that there were no opposition magazines in the Soviet Union, and that even the mildest criticism of the government would have earned him a very long sentence in some forgotten corner of Siberia. Montecristo cigar in hand, Infante proceeded to call me a “bourgeois reactionary” and several other phrases beloved of the Ivans and their acolytes that I hadn’t heard in a long time. Names that almost made me feel nostalgic for Russia, like some wet character in Chekhov. I fought in my corner for a while, but when two earnest, unattractive women started to call me an “apologist for fascism,” I began to feel beleaguered. It can be fun being insulted by a good-looking woman if you look at it from the point of view that she’s bothered to notice you at all. But it’s no fun at all to be insulted by her two ugly sisters. Finding not much conversational assistance from Noreen, who had perhaps drunk a little too much to come to my aid, I went to the lavatory, and while I was there, decided to cut my evening’s losses and leave. When I got back to my car, I found one of the other guests already there. He had come to offer an apology of sorts. His name was Alfredo López, and he was a lawyer—one of twenty-two lawyers, it seemed, who had defended the surviving rebels responsible for the attack on the Moncada Barracks in July 1953. Following the inevitable guilty verdict, the judge in the Santiago Palace of Justice had sentenced the rebels to what I considered to be fairly modest terms of imprisonment. Even the leader of the rebels, Fidel Castro Ruz, had been sentenced to just fifteen years. It was true, fifteen years was not exactly a light sentence, but for a man who had led an armed insurrection against a powerful dictator, it compared very well with a short walk to the guillotine at Plötzensee. López was in his mid-thirties, good-looking in a grinning, swarthy sort of way, with piercing blue eyes, a thin mustache, and a rubber swimming cap of shiny black hair. He wore white linen trousers and a dark blue open-neck guayabera shirt that helped to hide the beginnings of a potbelly. He smoked long cigarillos that were the color and shape of his womanly fingers. He looked like a very large cat that had been handed the cream-colored keys of the Caribbean’s largest dairy. “I am very sorry about that, my friend,” he said. “Lola and Carmen shouldn’t have been so rude. Putting politics ahead of simple politeness is unforgivable. Especially at the dinner table. If one cannot be civilized over a meal, what hope can there be for proper debate elsewhere?” “Forget it. I’m thick-skinned enough not to care very much. Besides, I’ve never been all that interested in politics. Especially not interested in talking about them. It always seems to me that by browbeating others we hope to be able to convince ourselves.” “Yes, there’s something in that, I think,” he allowed. “But you have to remember that Cubans are a very passionate people. Some of us are already convinced.” “Are you? I wonder.” “Take my word for it. There are many of us who are willing to sacrifice everything for freedom in Cuba. Tyranny is tyranny, no matter what the tyrant’s name.” “Perhaps I’ll have the chance to remind you of that one day, when your man is in charge of the tyranny.” “Fidel? Oh, he’s not at all a bad fellow. Perhaps if you knew a little more about him, you might be a little more sympathetic to our cause.” “I doubt it. Today’s freedom fighters are tomorrow’s dictators.” “No, really. Castro’s very different. He’s not out for himself.” “Did he tell you that? Or have you actually seen his bank statement?” “No, but I’ve seen this.” López opened the door of his car and fetched a briefcase from which he took a small, pamphlet-sized booklet. He had dozens more in the briefcase. As well as a large automatic pistol. I supposed he kept it handy for the occasions when proper, civilized political debate just wasn’t working. He held out the booklet in both his hands, as if it were something precious, like an auctioneer’s assistant showing a rare object to a roomful of potential buyers. On the front of the pamphlet was the picture of a rather stout-looking young man, not unlike López himself, with a thin mustache and hooded dark eyes. The man on the pamphlet looked more like a bandleader than the revolutionary I had read about in the newspapers. “This is a copy of the statement Fidel Castro made at his trial last November,” said López. “The tyranny allowed him the opportunity to speak, then,” I said, pointedly. “As I recall, Judge Roland Freisler—Raving Roland, they used to call him—he just screamed abuse at the men who had tried to blow up Hitler. Before sending them to the gallows. Oddly enough, I don’t remember any of them writing a pamphlet, either.” López ignored me. “It’s called History Will Absolve Me
. And we’ve only just finished printing it. So you can have the honor of being one of the first to read it. In the coming months, we’re planning to distribute this pamphlet all over the city. Please, señor
. At least read it, eh? If only because the man who wrote it is currently languishing in the Model Prison of the Isle of Pines.” “Hitler wrote a rather longer book, in Landsberg Prison, in 1928. I didn’t read that one, either.” “Don’t joke about this, please. Fidel is a friend to the people.” “So am I. Cats and dogs seem to like me, too. But I don’t expect them to put me in charge of the government.” “Promise me you’ll at least look at it.” “All right,” I said, taking it, keen to get rid of him. “If it means that much to you, I’ll read it. Just don’t ask me questions about it afterward. I’d hate to forget anything that might lose me the chance to gain a share of a collective farm. Or the opportunity to denounce someone for sabotaging the five-year plan.” I climbed back into my car and quickly drove away, hardly satisfied at the way the evening had turned out. At the bottom of the drive, I wound down the window and tossed Castro’s stupid pamphlet into the bushes before turning onto the main road north, to San Miguel del Padrón. I had a different plan in mind than the Cuban rebel leader, although it did involve the girls at the Casa Marina: from each accord
ing to her abilities, to each according to his needs. That was the sort of Cuban Marxian dialectic with which I was in complete sympathy. It was just as well that I had thrown away Castro’s pamphlet, because in front of the gas station around the next bend in the highway was a military roadblock. An armed militiaman flagged me down and ordered me to step out of the car. With my hands in the air, I meekly stood at the side of the road, while two other soldiers searched me and then my car under the steady gaze of the rest of the platoon and their boyish officer. I didn’t even look at him. My eyes were fixed on the two bodies lying facedown on the grass shoulder with most of their brains spilling out from under their hairlines. FOR A MOMENT it was June 1941, and I was back with my reserve police battalion, the 316th, on the road to Smolensk, at a place called Goloby, in the Ukraine, holstering my pistol. I was the officer in charge of a firing squad that had just executed a security unit of NKVD. This particular unit had recently finished murdering three thousand Ukrainian prisoners in the cells of the NKVD Prison at Lutsk, when our panzer wagons caught up with them. We shot them all. All thirty of them. Over the years I had tried to justify this execution to myself, but without much success. And many were the times when I woke up thinking about those twenty-eight men and two women. The majority of whom just happened to be Jews. Two of them I’d shot myself, delivering the so-called coup de grâce. But there was no grace in it. You could tell yourself it was war. You could even tell yourself that the people of Lutsk had begged us to go after the unit that had murdered their relatives. You could tell yourself that a bullet in the head was a quick, merciful death compared to what these people had meted out to their prisoners—most of them burned to death when the NKVD deliberately set fire to the prison. But it still felt like murder. AND WHEN I WASN’T LOOKING at the two bodies lying by the side of the road I was watching the police van parked a few meters away, and the several, frightened-looking occupants of its brightly lit interior. Their faces were bruised and bloodied and full of fear. It was like staring into a tank full of lobsters. You had the impression that at any moment one of them might be taken out and killed, like the two on the grass shoulder. Then the officer checked my identity card and asked me several questions in a nasal, cartoonish voice that might have made me smile had the situation seemed less lethal. A few minutes later, I was free to proceed with my journey back to Vedado. I drove on for about half a kilometer and then stopped at a little pink stone café by the roadside, where I asked the owner if I might use the telephone, thinking to call Finca Vigía and warn Noreen—and, in particular, Alfredo López—about the roadblock. It wasn’t that I liked the lawyer so much. I never yet met a lawyer I didn’t want to slap. But I didn’t think he deserved a bullet in the back of the head—which, almost certainly, was what would happen to him if the militia found him in possession of those pamphlets and a pistol. Nobody deserved that kind of ignominious fate. Not even the NKVD. The café owner was bald and clean-shaven, with thick lips and a broken nose. The man told me the phone had been out of order for days and blamed it on pequeños rebeldes
who liked to demonstrate their devotion to the revolution by shooting their catapultas
at the ceramic conductors on the telephone poles. If I wanted to warn López, it wasn’t going to be by telephone. Experience told me that the militia seldom allowed anyone to drive back through a roadblock. They would assume, rightly, that I intended to warn someone. I would have to find another route back to Finca Vigía—one that took me through the little side streets and avenues of San Francisco de Paula. But it was not an area I knew well, especially in the dark. “Do you know Finca Vigía—the American writer’s house?” I asked the café owner. “Of course. Everyone knows the house of Ernesto Hemingway.” “How would a man get there who didn’t want to drive down the main road, south to Cotorro?” I held up a five-peso note to help him think. The café owner grinned. “Do you perhaps mean a man who didn’t want to drive through the roadblock near the gas station?” I nodded. “Keep your money, señor
. I would not take money from a man who merely wished to avoid our beloved militia.” He led me out of the café. “Such a man as yourself would drive north, past the gas station in Diezmero, and turn left onto Varona. Then go across the river in Mantilla. At the junction he would go south, on Managua, and follow the road until he came upon the main highway going west toward Santa María del Rosario. At which point you would cross the main road north again and find Finca Vigía from there.” This series of directions was accompanied by much pointing, and like almost everything in Cuba, we had soon attracted a small crowd of café patrons, small boys, and stray dogs. “It will take you fifteen minutes, perhaps,” said the man. “Assuming you don’t end up in the Río Hondo or shot by the militia.” A couple of minutes later I was bouncing through the poorly lit, leafy backstreets of Mantilla and El Calvario like the crew of a stricken Dornier and wearily regretting the consumption of too much bourbon and red wine and probably a brandy or two. I steered the Chevrolet west, south, and then east again. Off the two-lane blacktop the roads weren’t much more than dirt tracks, and the Chevy’s rear end held its line with less grip than a recently sharpened ice skate. Unnerved by the sight of the two bodies, I was probably driving too fast. Suddenly there was a flock of goats in the road, and I twisted the wheel hard to the left so that the car spun around in a cloud of dust, narrowly missing a tree, and then the fence around a tennis court. Something gave way under the car as I braked and brought the car to a halt. And, thinking I might have a flat or, worse, a broken axle, I flung the door open and leaned out of the car to inspect the damage. “This is what you get for trying to do someone a favor,” I told myself, irritably. I saw that the car was undamaged and that the front left tire seemed to have broken through several planks of wood that were buried in the ground. I sat up straight and carefully reversed back onto the road. Then I got out to take another, closer look at what was buried. But because it was dark I couldn’t see very clearly, even in the car headlights, and I had to fetch a flashlight from the trunk to shine through the broken planks. Lifting one of the boards, I shone the flashlight through the hole and peered inside what appeared to be a buried crate. The size was difficult to determine, but inside the crate were several smaller wooden boxes. Stenciled on the lid of one of these boxes was MARK 2 FHGS; and on another was BROWNING M19. I had stumbled onto a hidden weapons cache. Immediately I switched off the flashlight and then the headlights of the car, and looked around in case anyone had seen me. The tennis court was clay and in a poor state of repair, with some of the white plastic rails missing or broken and the net hanging slackly like an old woman’s nylon stocking. Beyond the court was a dilapidated villa with a veranda and a big heavy gate that was badly rusted. Stucco was peeling off the villa’s façade, and there were no lights visible anywhere. No one had lived there for some time. After a while I lifted one of the broken planks and used it like a snowplow to move some dirt back on top of the weapons cache— enough to conceal it. Then I quickly marked the site with three stones I took from the other side of the road. All this took less than five minutes. It wasn’t a place I wanted to linger. Not with militia in the area. They were hardly likely to accept my explanation for how it was I came to be burying a weapons cache at midnight on a lonely road in El Calvario, no more than the people who had buried it there would have believed that I wasn’t going to inform the police. I had to get away from there as quickly as possible. So I jumped back in my car and drove off. I arrived back at Finca Vigía just as Alfredo López was getting back into the white Oldsmobile to drive himself home. I reversed up next to him. Then I wound down my window. López did the same. “Something wrong?” he asked. “It could be. If you were a man with a thirty-eight and a briefcase full of rebel pamphlets.” “You know I am.” “López, my friend, you might care to think about getting out of the pamphleteering business for a while. There’s a militia roadblock on the main road north, just next to the gas station in Diezmero.” “Thanks for the warning. I guess I’ll
have to find another route home.” I shook my head. “I drove back here through Mantilla and El Calvario. There was another truckload of them getting ready to deploy down there, as well.” I said nothing about the weapons cache I’d found. I thought it was best that I forget all about that. For now. “It would seem that they’re looking to catch some fish tonight,” he observed. “The keep net was full, it’s true,” I said. “But it looked to me as if they were planning to do a little more than just catch fish. Shoot them in a barrel, perhaps. I saw two on the side of the road. And they looked as dead as a couple of smoked mackerel.” “These were individual tragedies, I suppose,” he said. “Of course, a couple of deaths are hardly comparable with the rule of genuine tyrants like Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.” “Think what you like. I didn’t come here to make a convert. Just to save your stupid neck.” “Yes, of course, I’m sorry.” López pursed his lips for a moment and then bit one of them hard enough to hurt. “They don’t usually bother coming as far south of Havana as this.” Noreen came out of the house and down the front steps. A glass was in her hand, and it wasn’t empty. She didn’t look drunk. She didn’t even sound drunk. But since I was probably drunk myself, none of that counted for anything. “What’s the matter?” she asked me. “Change your mind about leaving, did you?” There was a note of sarcasm in her voice. “That’s right,” I said. “I came back to see if anyone had an unwanted copy of The Communist Manifesto