Fernando strode into El Comandante’s room without knocking. He was in full military uniform after his meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The lot of them had been ordering an immoderate number of cut-rate tanks and artillery from North Korea. With 10 percent of the island’s population employed by the armed forces, Fernando considered these purchases a necessary bulwark against unrest. His goal: to keep the Revolution rebellion-proof by achieving the perfect ratio of military personnel to civilians. Unfortunately, he was less interested in other aspects of running the country. The economy was in a shambles, the hospitals had no aspirin, and nobody got what their ration books promised except for their monthly quotas of sugar and rum.
“You had an accident?” Fernando asked tentatively.
“¡Que tonto! You think I deliberately set myself on fire?”
“Cálmate, hermano. Who did this to you?”
“Have you seen the news?” Reports of the conflagration had been immediately broadcast on the Miami exiles’ news stations.
“Same old lies.” Fernando smoothed his mustache.
“How did they know about this in ten fucking seconds?”
“I’ll look into it right away.”
“I want everyone investigated.” The tyrant felt the stirrings of another conspiracy afoot, and he wanted it quashed before it got out of hand.
Fernando’s back was ramrod straight. He was a veritable fountain of youth next to his ailing older brother. By nightfall, he would find out who was behind the news leak and have them arrested.
“How the hell am I supposed to relax when their spies are watching me take a crap and smoke my last cigar?”
Fernando’s eyes drifted to the wall clock.
“I want to talk to the people tonight. Clear out all other programming.”
“Do you think that’s advisable?”
It was Thursday, and there’d be complaints over the cancellation of the wildly popular telenovela from Argentina. The lead actress, a callipygian hellion from the Pampas, played a nymphomaniac chef who wielded a meat cleaver like a martial artist.
“What excuse can you give me, Fernando? That our people would rather watch Gaucho Love than listen to me?”
“I don’t like seeing you so agitated. You need to rest.”
“I’ll be fucking resting for eternity!”
Fernando had suffered countless of his brother’s tantrums over the years. To say anything else at this point would only invite more abuse.
“The people need to know that the Revolution must go on, with or without me.” El Comandante pulled at his beard. “Those gusanos will undo everything, change the street names, tear apart our history.”
“That won’t happen, I promise you—”
“Who’ll take over once we’re gone, Fernando? When we die, so will the Revolution.”
“The Revolution will never die. The people will—”
“The people will sell us out for a bar of soap!” the despot cried, spittle flying.
During the worst of the Special Period, after the Soviet Union collapsed and its five billion dollars in annual subsidies to Cuba along with it, when basic necessities were scarce and the plumpish populace lost, on average, twenty-two pounds (statistics were kept on such matters), what Cubans complained about most bitterly was the lack of soap. The Revolution was brought to its knees, its citizens forced into prostitution (often for a few hotel toiletries), because the government couldn’t keep them squeaky clean.
“You underestimate them—”
“Or a cell phone. Or a plate of dichoso pork chops! We might convince everyone on this island that the sea is red, but let’s not deceive ourselves!”
“If I believed you, I’d put a bullet in my head.” Fernando lowered his voice. “You’re overexcited. Let me take care of this.”
El Comandante shifted onto his right hip, then changed the subject. “And what’s this I hear about plans to build luxury casinos in Varadero?”
“It w-will attract a higher caliber of tourist.” Fernando stuttered when he was nervous. He didn’t dare tell his brother about his preliminary talks with the Mexicans.1
“We’re not that desperate yet. Cancel it.”
“But—”
“I said cancel the casinos. We’re not goddamn Monaco here! Whatever happened to going green, anyway?”
“We’ll never be in the black by going green,” Fernando quipped.
“Cojones, you sound like a captain of industry.”
“Hermano, we are the captains of industry here.”
His brother had been succumbing to too many bourgeois indulgences of late—Rolexes, hot tubs, golf, and now casinos. Some Communist ideologue he’d turned out to be. El Comandante didn’t bother asking about the disastrous real estate reforms already under way.
“And the Bay of Pigs reenactment?”
“We’re having trouble getting those old planes to work.” Fernando avoided his brother’s gaze. “Besides, no one wants to play the bad guys.”
“Who the hell gets to decide what they want to do around here?” El Comandante struggled to sit upright. “Listen to me, Fernando. Everything must be perfect. Down to the combatants’ stinking underwear. Do you hear me? The eyes of the world will be watching us again.”
“I’m on it,” Fernando whined, then turned around and left.
Let him sulk, the tyrant grumbled. The Revolution’s party days were over. The sooner Fernando realized this, the better. The two were overly attuned to each other’s moods. It’d begun when they were boys and Fernando inexplicably stopped talking. For eight months he relied on his older brother to speak for him, to say Fernando hurt his knee, or needs to take a shit, or wants vanilla ice cream. One day they snuck into a neighborhood cockfight, and the favored rooster swiftly decapitated the other and plucked out its eyes in the first round. “Puta madre, did you see that?” With those words, Fernando rejoined the ranks of the articulate. Now cockfighting was making a comeback in the capital. The best ring, by all accounts, was in Regla. Fernando wanted to shut it down, but the despot advised him to wait and strike when the ring was more flush with cash.
A pair of dazzling peacocks strutted and shrieked in the gardens below. The birds had been shipped from Madagascar at his wife’s request. El Líder studied their tremulous, iridescent plumage. These two had been impressing each other for years without a single female to distract them. When he’d complained to Delia about being surrounded by maricones, she’d nibbled on his ear and said: “Mi amor, you know as well as I do that boy animals are prettier than the girls.” Who was he to argue?
A stack of fresh reports was piled high on his desk: annual nickel production, last winter’s lobster harvest, revisions to the elementary school curriculum, tobacco exports to Switzerland, illegal marijuana production in Oriente, the trade imbalance with Mozambique, an exposé on the cross-dressing babalawos of Camagüey, another on Baracoa’s illicit moonshine operators. (Five people had died from the sweet potato liquor.) How the hell did he know what was true anymore? People told him only what they thought he wanted to hear. Nobody had the nerve to say that this plan was unsound, or that most government employees didn’t bother to show up for work on any given day. Cuba was riddled with corruption, hustlers, parasites; plagued by a culture of sinecure, amiguismo, back-scratching, ball-scratching. If you didn’t lie, cheat, or steal2 you were considered stupid or incredibly naïve. If you happened to be a genuinely honest, hardworking revolutionary, you came under the worst scrutiny of all: accused of being a spy, a sellout angling for some negligible advantage over your neighbor.
Seagulls soared along the shore, peering down at the glinting sea for fish. El Comandante took a swig of cognac from a flask hidden in his nightstand. It disheartened him to be so infirm and uncommanding. If only he could resuscitate the spirit of the early days, when the literacy campaign had taught a million peasants to read. Or figure out how to become a martyr, if he wasn’t already too damn old for that. In the fifties, Orthodox Party leader Eddie Chibás had shot himself in the stomach on his weekly radio show over a stupid political embarrassment and had become an instant saint. How Cubans loved their martyrs, roasting them over the fires of memory like suckling pigs!
The tyrant fixated on a crack in the ceiling. It looked, dispiritingly, like the state of Florida. For decades he’d ruled the country by jeep, traveling to its remotest corners to oversee the installation of electric generators, or the building of sugar refineries, or to slap the back of every last worker at a copper processing plant. His tireless work used to inspire his people. Not anymore. He felt cheated. So much effort, and for what? To watch his island sink into mediocrity and wholesale thievery? Each brick filched from a construction site, each vial of medication sold on the black market was a slap to his face.
The abuses got more outrageous every day. Just yesterday he’d heard that prison buses were being rented out for weddings, quinceañeras, and beach shuttles. That three tanks’ worth of oil from human remains (stolen from the Guanabacoa crematorium) were being sold on Havana’s streets as cooking oil. That everyone—rappers, cartoonists, school children—was mocking the moringa, a miraculous plant he’d taken great pains to import from India to feed the people. Black market hustlers had even gotten ahold of the pesticide from the campaign against dengue fever and were auctioning it off to the highest bidder. Nobody on the whole goddamn island did a lick of work but complained all day about the lack of fucking mops. His were a people sans rigueur, as Napoleon might’ve put it. They expected the country to prosper without sacrifices on their part.
How the hell could he not take it personally?
El Comandante coughed up a knot of phlegm and summoned El Conejo with the push of a button. His principal adviser appeared without delay, nose twitching, teeth so severely splayed that they invited both revulsion and pity. El Conejo didn’t keep notes, relying instead on his computer database of a brain. In nineteen years of service, he’d forgotten nothing, nobody, not a single salient detail entrusted to him by the tyrant. The man couldn’t be blackmailed either, because he’d never been known to so much as blink with carnal interest at another living creature.
“Find out what’s going on with those hunger strikers. I want a full accounting.” People were surprised at how soft the tyrant’s voice could be in private, too; so opposite his public thunder.
“A sus órdenes, Jefe.”
Everyone thinks just because I work at a resort that I’m rolling in money. But the tourists who come here don’t leave tips. Since they’re on prepaid package tours, it doesn’t occur to them to leave me so much as a miserable peso for cleaning their rooms. So here’s what I do: short them a towel and pretend it was they who lost it. The hotel charges fifteen dollars for a lost towel, so it makes sense for them to pay me a peso or two to “find” it. If the guests indignantly refuse (only the Germans refuse), they’ll still be charged and I’ll get my cut from the front desk.
—Idalia Ferrer, chambermaid
Every public appearance by the Maximum Leader required the efforts of dozens. If he didn’t look perfectly groomed and lucid—tremor-free, no slurring of words or faltering of any kind—the rumor mill worked overtime churning out more lies. The latest outrage making the rounds would be ludicrous if it weren’t so poisonous: that the tyrant was, in fact, already dead and the government was using a body double to maintain stability. But the lies that irked him most took aim at his manhood: that cancer had eaten away two-thirds of his balls; that his pinga had shriveled to the size of a Vienna choirboy’s. Maybe he should drop his pants on television and show those bastards what he still had between his legs!
Around him, the TV station was on high alert. Everyone was running back and forth and talking at once. His nephew Javier was the producer in charge of this mayhem. An ambitious little man with a theatrical streak, he was the opposite of his taciturn father. Whenever El Líder looked into his nephew’s eyes, he saw someone who wanted to stand in his shoes before he’d stepped out of them.
“Por favor, Comandante, look this way.” The makeup artist moved El Líder’s chin an inch to the right and patted some foundation on his nose with a spongy wedge. She’d been entrusted to make him look as healthy and youthful as possible by minimizing his liver spots, lightening his under-eye pouches, tinting his lips and cheeks with a touch of color. Endless mariconería, but he submitted to these indignities for the sole purpose of deflecting viewers’ attention from his battered appearance to the substance of what he had to say.
A violent debate broke out over the degree of formality appropriate for El Comandante’s first speech in fourteen months. Should he stand in military dress behind a podium (with its added assurance of support), or appear relaxed on a sofa, more like the commander in chief emeritus? If this was going to be his swan song, the tyrant decided, then he would go down—if he was going down—like a soldier. A staff physician injected him with vitamins while a nurse spooned cough suppressant into his mouth. His dentures were pinching like the devil, but there was no time to adjust them.
If there was any grumbling about the bumping of the Argentine telenovela, nobody dared say so to his face. Often, he wished that Cuba could grow rich again. The despot recalled the fleeting possibility some years back that the island might be sitting atop huge oil reserves. Before the exploratory drilling even started, the United States had filed a slew of lawsuits, claiming that the oil, should it exist, belonged to them. In the end the reserves were far smaller than El Comandante had hoped and far too costly to drill. As his best economist told him: “Trying to extract it would put us all back in loincloths.”
A trio of perfumed wardrobe assistants helped the tyrant into his uniform. The jacket was heavy with medals. Why was it that the most beautiful women worked in television? For a time, El Comandante had preferred the taut angularity of ballerinas (Cuba produced the finest dancers in the world). Yet for all their grace and passion under the floodlights, they proved inhibited in bed, too critical of their bodies. To them, an ounce of fat was the stuff of tragedy. He’d devoted a great deal of thought to what constituted the perfect woman. He had his proclivities, of course—blondes with blue or green eyes, tiny waists, ample hips, and the younger the better. Women over forty, with rare exceptions, were best viewed fully clothed or in the dark, though many were good for the game all night long. Ay, to have seen Delia as a seventeen-year-old in a tight white bathing suit strolling along the beach at—
“Jefe, I have the news you requested.”
Irritated, the dictator turned toward his adviser. “I’m about to go on the air.”
“Infiltrated by foreign agents. Potential fiasco.” El Conejo barely moved his lips when he spoke. His consonants were mere fumes. “The Church, too, is involved.”
“That asshole Mexican bishop?”
“Along with the Pope and peninsular agents.” El Conejo’s nostrils flared.
The tyrant had underestimated the international impact of those goddamn hunger strikers. He didn’t know who was worse—those idiots starving themselves, the bloggers spewing lies, or the Damas de Blanco subjecting themselves to daily beatings and arrest. Those bitches might turn out to be most dangerous of all. Hadn’t the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo brought down the generals in Argentina? And those Mirabal sisters, murdered under Trujillo, had set in motion his demise. Assassination plots he knew how to handle. Armed insurrection. Political dirty dealings. But unarmed women? Men starving themselves in the name of freedom? Damn it, he’d have them force-fed if it came down to it. Not a single one of them was going to croak on his watch.
“Let’s get this show started.” He thrust his cane at an underling and hobbled to center stage. The lights brightened and the cameras rolled. El Comandante barely waited for the last notes of the national anthem before he broke in: “Nobody, do you hear me? Nobody will steal this revolution away from us. I’d prefer to see it in ruins than sold off, piecemeal, to the highest bidder. The day is coming, ciudadanos, when your faith in our great society will be tested.”
Damn it, how he loved to hear his voice fill a room; nothing was more powerful to him. Nothing sounded more like Cuba than his voice. It was bigger than him somehow. Oceanic. Invincible. He was two people: him and his voice. Fuck them all, he thought.
“I’m well aware that there are persons at home and abroad who’ve been plotting, under the guise of empty martyrdom, to embarrass our revolution in the eyes of the world. Listen to me well, counterrevolutionaries and imperialist coverts: your tricks will not be tolerated! Not by me nor by the legions of good revolutionaries who continue to carry on in the spirit of Che!”
The dictator looked directly into the eye of the biggest camera, which was moving in for a close-up, black and glossy as a Cyclopean owl’s. He shifted from one leg to the other, felt the grind of bone in socket, imagined himself flying through the air, a basketball at the tips of his fingers, rotating light.
Carajo, where was he?
“Next month, we’ll begin the first in a series of historical reenactments of our revolution, to remind ourselves—as well as our friends and enemies around the globe—how hard we’ve fought, how much we’ve been willing to sacrifice for our goals. Never in the history of mankind has one small country accomplished such gargantuan deeds. Not only here at home, where freedom and prosperity have reigned for nearly six decades, but abroad, where we’ve sent legions of our doctors and nurses and teachers, who’ve struggled, and continue to struggle, in solidarity with our friends and fellow revolutionaries.”
El Comandante touched the microphone on his lapel. It was round as a beetle, reminiscent of the Ministry of the Interior’s antiquated bugs. A screeching echoed through the studio, and the soundman jerked off his headphones. The tyrant preferred the bulbous, old-fashioned microphones, the ones he could adjust and tap and caress while his next volley of thoughts coalesced. Tonight he wanted to strike fear in his listeners, renew their unswerving dedication.
“Do you think the reactionary Yankee henchmen do what we do? Why do their slums teem with poverty and the unemployed? Why do their people die from a lack of basic health care? Why do millions of their homeless roam the streets? Why, ciudadanos, are the poodles in Beverly Hills taken to plastic surgeons for tummy tucks? Profit, and more profit, that’s why! It is profit, not justice, that motivates the capitalist scum—and they will step on, overthrow, murder, or destroy anyone who gets in their way. Necessities that we provide to each and every one of you free of charge cost infinitely more than luxuries for a few. Think about it: you can buy a thousand bicycles for the price of one brand-new Cadillac!”
Fernando made a chopping motion at him from the wings, but his brother ignored him. Focus, the tyrant reminded himself. Focus.
“These historical reenactments, ordered by me, will bring to life the most illustrious days of our revolution. The inaugural event will be a solemn remembrance of our triumph at the Bay of Pigs. Never before had the imperialist colossus to the north been defeated, much less by an adversary a fraction of its size, with a fraction of its fighter planes, ammunitions—”
A tremor skittered up the back of El Comandante’s leg and spread to his buttocks, which began twitching like a rumba dancer. A milky substance occluded his vision. Focus, focus.
“What the Yankees hadn’t counted on was that our material deficiencies were nothing compared to our surplus of determination—the determination of a people unwilling to behave like the slaves they kept enchained for centuries. The Empire’s days are numbered. Do you hear me? Numbered! But . . . but . . . our revolution has only just begun!”
Something pink swirled behind his eyes, a fleeting iridescence. He heard his mother singing at twilight, a plangent song from another century. Bésame, bésame mucho / Como si fuera esta noche la última vez / Bésame, bésame mucho / Que tengo miedo a perderte, perderte después . . .3
“So I am here tonight, ciudadanos, to exhort you to fight like those brave men and women at the Bay of Pigs, who saved you from a fate still suffered by millions around the world and who—”
A cramp seized his other leg and his breath came in ragged bursts. The tyrant forced himself to continue. “Furthermore, it has come to my attention that shameful irregularities and abuses of our resources are taking—” And then he passed out.
1 Radio Bemba: Fernando is looking to partner up with Mexico for a share of the drug trade. But you know what they say: cartels = organized crime; government = disorganized crime.
2 Stealing is an ugly word, Papito, but I ask you this: when I steal your entry fee from the state, why do you call that “theft”? Everyone here works for slave wages, so I ask you: who’s robbing whom?
—Yvette Aguirre, Partagás factory tour guide
3This is our most lucrative song. We pick out the fattest, ugliest tourist we can find in La Plaza de Armas and love her up with it. Tony plays guitar, Miguel has the voice, and I put on my Panama hat and move in for the kill. When she opens her purse to give us a tip, I get a good look at what’s inside. More songs, another tip. A kiss or two, another tip. You never know where it might end. If she insists “No más,” we move on to the next one. Later, we divide the spoils.