PROLOGUE
GUANABACOA, HAVANA
September 9, 2017
When the lights went out around five that afternoon, and the television swallowed itself dark, the lone fan in the house, the white plastic one from China with the brand name Hopeful, slowed to a dead stop. That’s when Cary, Pipo, and Oscar, along with Faru, their scrawny Pekingese with a bad underbite, knew it was time to hide. Cubans are no strangers to hurricanes, but this one made even the most storm-scarred of them shudder: a category five monster named Irma, with 165-mile-an-hour winds, torrential rain, and 16-foot-high waves, which was scheduled—if it kept to the timetable delivered by the gloomy TV meteorologists—to smash into Guanabacoa, their quirky hometown across the harbor from Old Havana, between two and three the next morning. The electricity surely wouldn’t return by then, but how long they’d be in the dark, or what they’d find when the lights came back on, nobody could say.
They’d developed and refined their own drill to prepare for big storms like this one, with every member of the family assigned specific tasks. Oscar was just twenty-six, so it was up to him to climb up to the roof and tie down everything that could blow away. His father, Jesús, who everyone knew as Pipo, scoured the neighborhood for food while his mom, Cary, was in charge of everything else. She taped the windows, closed the shutters, and filled enough old soda bottles with purified water to last a few days. When she was done, she took a minute to call Cuka, her lifelong friend in Tacajó, the little sugar town in eastern Cuba where both of them grew up, to make sure everyone there was prepared for the nightmare headed toward them.
Cuka picked up right away. Yes, she was all right. Everyone else too. She’d already done all she could, and there was nothing left to do but hunker down and wait. Waiting was a skill that Cubans mastered no matter where they lived or what they were doing. At first, Cary and Pipo thought of riding out the storm where they often did, in Oscar’s bedroom. Their house was big and solid—a prerevolution midcentury modern that had been split into two apartments; their upstairs neighbors had even built a clandestine metalworking shop on the roof. But the coming storm threatened to be so bad they might be stuck inside for a long time. Oscar’s room was the smallest in the house, and there was nothing but louvers in the windows to keep out the wind and rain. There wasn’t enough room for them in the kitchen or storeroom, and the parlor, facing the street, was far too exposed. That left their own bedroom, with its lone window facing south, away from Irma.
They were getting the bedroom ready when the phone rang, surprising them. It was Pipo’s younger sister Luz María calling from Cárdenas, ninety miles away, to let them know that, despite the storm, her son’s girlfriend had gone to the hospital to give birth to their first child. After that, the phone too went dead. Their only radio, a hand-cranked one that Pipo had given Cary one Valentine’s Day, was broken, leaving them almost as cut off from the outside as if they were stranded in Cuba’s remote Sierra Maestra mountains.
Not long after they had settled into the bedroom for the night, the rain started. Not a downpour but bulging drops so fat and heavy they could almost hear them fall one at a time, splashing into the dirt but doing nothing to cool things off. With all three of them in there, and Faru panting frantically on the floor, the bedroom soon was stifling. Cary got up to open the casement window, and the musty smell of rain and dirt washed in. From where they lay, with their heads at the foot of the bed and their feet pointing toward the open window, they had a clear view of the blood-orange sky. For Cary, the strange light and evocative scents brought back harrowing reminders of another storm. She was just a girl then, living with her mother and twin sister in a rooming house near Cuka in Tacajó. When Hurricane Flora tore through, what little they had was nearly blown away.
With the three of them so close, Oscar soon got antsy and started complaining about the heat. Pipo was hot too, but what bothered him more was the metal roof of the warehouse across the street. Several times already, he’d said that if it blew off, they’d be right in its path. Cary told both of them to cut it out. Their house was made of concrete, wasn’t it? And though their pantry wasn’t full, there was some food in there, wasn’t there? “Just calm down. We’ll be all right.”
Through the open window all she could see were the dark clouds that blotted out the stars. That gave her an idea. When she was a girl in Tacajó she’d learned a song about stars that always helped her calm down whenever she was frightened.
“Do you two want to hear a song?”
Through tempests and turmoil, Cary—Caridad Luisa Limonta Ewen—was always helping others. They joked that she’d been born first so she could show her twin sister the way. And like her late mother, Zenaida, she tackled whatever Cuba threw at her with confidence and courage.
With the wind kicking up, and the warehouse roof clattering, Cary sang the melancholy old song in a low, sweet voice that her husband and son could barely hear, a lullaby in the storm.
Pregúntale a las estrellas si por las noches me ven llorar
Ask the stars if at night they see me cry
Ask if I do not seek to love you, how lonely am I
Ask the gentle river if it sees my tears running
Ask all the world the depth of my own suffering.
Just as Cary hoped, the song helped settle them down. As Irma drew closer, Pipo and Oscar fell into an uneasy sleep. But not Cary. She couldn’t stop thinking about Cuka and Tacajó and the terrible hurricane she’d lived through when she was a child. Nor could she forget the innocent baby being born into this monstrous storm. They knew it was a girl; the tests had shown that months before, and the date for the cesarean had been long planned. But what terrible timing! Would they name her Irma? Or would they stick with tradition and check the church calendar of saints, cursing her with a name like Wilfreda? She’d rather be named for a night of terror.
As the hours passed, Cary was bone tired, but she kept staring at the open window, listening to the wind tugging at the warehouse roof and looking for the stars that she knew were there though she couldn’t see them.
All of Guanabacoa (wan-ah-ba-COE-ah) was on edge that night. Just down the street from Cary and Pipo, Lili Durand Hernández went around her apartment shutting all the windows and doors as much to keep out the storm as to keep in her elderly father, who had started to wander. About a mile away, in the rundown center of Guanabacoa, María del Carmen López Álvarez remembered what her own father had always told her about their sturdy little house, which the family had owned for more than a century. If it survived the big ones in 1926 and 1944, he’d say whenever a storm approached, it’ll make it through any others. She had so much faith in the old house that the only precautions she took were to have the TV antenna taken down and the big clay pot, called a tinajón, in the patio filled with fresh water. And just to be safe, she asked her son to take the life-size busts of Julius Caesar and Raphael off their pedestals and lay them on the floor.
A block away from María del Carmen, on the opposite side of the church of Los Escolapios, Arturo Montoto worried about Irma’s approach in a way that nobody else in Guanabacoa could imagine. His biggest concern was not the art studio and extensive garden he had spent so much time and money building, but a six-foot-tall resin foam sculpture of a baseball, completely black with stitches of bright red thread, that was sitting in his courtyard. It was so big and so round that once he had bonded the two halves together, he could not get it back inside. His assistants had lugged it under an awning, but they had no way to tie it down. He checked to make sure it was protected from the rain, then he took one last look around his property, ending at the orchard he had planted with his own hands: lush mango trees, a lissome lemon tree, a banana tree with its floppy leaves waving wildly as the winds picked up. He would have loved to plant a mamoncillo tree too, like the ones he remembered as a boy, but they took such a long time to mature that he knew he’d never taste its fruit.
And although Jorge García was awaiting the storm 230 miles away from Guanabacoa, in a dumpy ranch house across the street from a Miami boatyard, he was keeping a close eye on his old hometown. He’d escaped from Cuba twenty years earlier, but his grandson was still there, and whenever a big storm threatened Guanabacoa, Jorge worried. He’d already lost far too much to Cuba.
IRMA WAS JUST ONE FLASHPOINT of concern for Cubans in the stormy year between Fidel Castro’s death in November 2016 and his brother Raúl’s staged departure from office in 2018. Those two events seemed to draw the curtain on the long-running Castro era and presage the dawn of a new, uncertain, and not yet fully formed act in Cuba’s long history. With the revolution sagging under the weight of six decades of grand promises—some realized, many others still a dream—the communist government was toying with capitalism the way a tiger plays with its prey: tapping it lightly one minute, squeezing the life out of it the next. Socialist officials urged would-be Cuban capitalists to go ahead and open their small businesses, then they erected layers of burdensome regulations to limit profit and handicap success. Their real goal was not to lift millions out of poverty. It was to prevent anyone from making millions.
Despite those constraints, half a million Cubans preferred to work for themselves rather than the state. But then just as they were getting used to living without a man named Castro leading the nation, the political and economic feud with the United States flared up again. Donald Trump reversed parts of Barack Obama’s historic opening of a few years earlier, frightening away American tourists and making the short trip to Cuba once again seem forbidding. Washington then lumped Cuba together with Venezuela and Nicaragua in what it called a “troika of tyranny” and put crosshairs on all three countries. Ordinary Cubans had no choice but to brace for another “special period” that they feared could turn out to be even worse than the shortages and desperation they suffered in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union disappeared, taking with it the billions Cuba relied on to keep the revolution alive.
In Guanabacoa, as in most other parts of Cuba, the Obama opening had raised hopes, and the Trump reversal dashed them. The sensually restored Old Havana that Americans discovered during the brief tourism boom was the cartoon fantasy version of Cuba. Guanabacoa is the gritty 3-D reality most Cubans live with—broken streets, collapsing buildings, more garbage than flowers. Hot. Smelly. Noisy. Raw. The proud old town predates every U.S. city, and in its nearly 500-year history it has experienced many ups and downs. Officially a part of Havana, it sits on the other side of the city’s fabled harbor, but it could be any place along the 760 miles of the main Cuban island, each with its own unique culture and identity. Its 120,000 residents are no more likely to say they live in Havana than residents of Brooklyn are to describe where they live as New York.
“Después del triunfo,” “after the triumph,” is Cuban shorthand for everything that has happened since Fidel and Raúl Castro grabbed power in 1959. Everyone knows that Fidel remade Cuba’s political, economic, and social structures, putting the state in charge of and above everything and everyone but him. During most of Cuba’s six decades of revolution, the real people of Cuba have largely been hidden behind his king-size image.
As Cuba starts to move from the Castro era to whatever comes next, it is changing in many ways—even if the images of old cars and ancient buildings suggest that time is standing still. Some of Cuba’s leaders have ideas about business and property that are radically different from Fidel’s, but it’s not at all clear whether this represents a desperate attempt to prop up an exhausted revolution, or the genuine beginning of a new nation. For decades, analysts and correspondents routinely referred to “Fidel Castro’s Cuba,” as if the country he controlled since 1959 belonged entirely to him. When he died in 2016, state-run media in Cuba proclaimed, “Fidel es Patria,” “Fidel is the fatherland,” while schoolchildren were encouraged to repeat, “I am Fidel.”
But those children and their parents are not Fidel any more than the dead Fidel ever was Cuba. They are ordinary people like Cary, Arturo, Lili, Jorge, and María del Carmen. Real Cubans, living in real places like Guanabacoa where the old cars are not prized classics, but just ugly hunks of battered metal, held together by wire and running on hope. Where the rum is cheap and comes in small cardboard boxes. Where there are no robocalls, no fad diets, no supermarket flyers or commercial billboards. Where daily life depends not on tourist dollars but on the courage, confidence, and inventiveness of people living with an excess of prohibitions and a minimum of inhibitions. Where people have become masters at masking their misery with vibrant music and rapturous dancing, disguising their frustrations with layers of disrespectful mocking, making a joke of almost everything and taking almost nothing so seriously that it merits their protest.
For their entire lives, Cary and the others have had no choice but to be minor characters in Cuba’s never-ending passion play, forced to take one of only three paths the revolution left open to them: They could join the masses and comply with the Castros’ dictates whether or not they believed in them. They could take the heroic path and resist, accepting that to do so was suicide. Or they could flee.
If it sometimes seems that all Cubans are, as they say of themselves, un poco loco, a little crazy, it is because they live in an impossible country. They have been on what amounts to war footing for three generations now. Their government constantly reminds them of the imperialist peril from the north, yet it also demands that the empire drop its embargo so that Cuba can do more business with America and its allies. The regime has used the perpetual threat of American intervention as cover for every misstep, failed program, food shortage, or power blackout over the last six decades, but it also depends on the billions of American dollars that exiles send back in remittances to keep Cuba afloat. State-run media presents the United States as a hellhole of drug addiction, mass murder and runaway consumerism, while portraying Cuba as an egalitarian paradise run by a government that can do no wrong. And yet, when Cubans compare their own lives with what they hear from relatives in Miami or with what they see on the internet, they know it isn’t so.
That would be enough to drive anyone mad, but it accounts for only part of the Cubans’ precarious hold on the reality of their lives. They have long been cursed by their own greatest strength—their indomitable adaptability and their bottomless capacity to make do. That’s why the U.S. embargo hasn’t worked, and never will. The idea of making conditions on the island so intolerable that the people will rise up and crush the Castro regime ignores the Cubans’ innate ability to find a way to survive. People who can turn a plastic soda bottle into a gas tank for a motorcycle, or use an old piston heated in a kitchen stove to repair a flat tire, see the world differently from other more conventional societies. When adversity is a constant, survival is a process of adjustment. Perhaps living on an island routinely hit by hurricanes has helped them develop this aspect of their national character. After all, nothing can stop a hurricane or prevent it from doing damage. The only option is to pick up the pieces and figure out how to reuse them.
Unlike Fidel, whose millions of words have been heard, recorded, and replayed ad infinitum, these ordinary Cubans are never heard from. Their voices have few outlets inside Cuba, and fewer still outside the island. When they speak out, it usually is in small rooms where they hope that the whoosh of a table fan or the tinny sound of an old TV keeps their remarks from prying ears. Most never get involved in public protests for fear of retribution from a state system of surveillance that they believe watches over their every move. Only the bravest or most desperate risk everything to join the small number of outspoken dissidents that the government stalks, harasses, and sometimes imprisons. But it is undoubtedly the complicated silence of their ordinary lives—their personal histories of living with an interminable revolution, their changing priorities and shifting alliances, their triumphs and their tragedies from one moment to the next in an endless stream of warm days under a brilliant sun—that tell the remarkable story of Cuba best.