CHAPTER 19
HAVANA
May 2005
After doctors installed a pacemaker in Cary’s chest, she recuperated quickly and eagerly returned to work. But the new contraption near her heart didn’t seem to be functioning the way it was supposed to. When she complained, doctors told her the pacemaker was doing its job; she just had to give it time. It was a medical student at the hospital who finally came up with the correct diagnosis: when the pacemaker had been implanted, she had picked up an infection that had gone straight to her heart.
The deadly diagnosis deepened the apprehension she had been experiencing since Zenaida confronted her with that damning list of upside-down priorities. Cary knew she was being poisoned from inside, and yet she had gone back to work and was giving her all to support a system that had deceived her. She had spent the better part of her entire life rising through that system, taking on more and more duties, neglecting Pipo and Oscar, even after all she’d suffered to become a mother. Now, all that she had worked so hard to achieve was put at risk by the very surgery that was supposed to help her. Doctors warned her that the kind of open-heart surgery she needed to treat the endocarditis had only a minuscule chance of success. What if she didn’t make it? Oscar was only thirteen. He needed both his parents. She already regretted the time she could have spent with him but hadn’t because she was focused on giving her all to Fidel’s Cuba instead of her own.
As she was being taken into the operating room, she sang “Pregúntale a las estrellas” to herself to keep from panicking. The surgeons cut her chest open and put her on an artificial heart machine while they removed the infected pacemaker and scrubbed the infection out of her heart. They then installed a new pacemaker near her waist, as far from the contamination as was feasible.
Cary took several months to recover, and by the time she felt well enough to return to work, she asked to be relieved of her position as vice minister, feeling she no longer had the strength, or the desire, to continue in the high-pressure job. She was given a special position as assistant to the woman who replaced her. But then she found that although her title had changed, her work was as strenuous as ever. To keep from being overwhelmed, she paid a woman who had recently moved into the neighborhood to help her around the house. Cary and her new neighbor found that they shared a similar background. María Luisa Durand Hernández—everyone called her Lili—also had followed her mother from sugar country in Cuba’s far east to remake herself in Havana. Cary took a liking to Lili, though they were ten years apart in age and leagues apart in their training and achievements. Still, as they got to know each other, Lili came to think of Cary as a model communist. And Cary saw Lili the same way.
LILI CAME FROM A FAMILY of campesinos in Banes, a small city not far from Tacajó. When she was just a girl, her mother took off for Havana and left her with her grandparents on their small subsistence farm. Her revolutionary indoctrination began early. She attended Heroes of Girón School, and when she was fourteen, she joined her local CDR. Her grandparents were caring but rigid in an old-fashioned way that seemed out of touch with what she thought was the spirit of revolutionary Cuba. They didn’t allow her to go to parties or have a quinceañera. When she was old enough to attend high school, she told them she wanted to live in Santiago, where her father, José, worked as a stevedore and where she had aunts and cousins who’d keep an eye on her.
Lili grew up adoring Fidel and hating Batista, the dictator who had been born in Banes. When she attended her first May Day parade in Santiago, surrounded by thousands pledging themselves to the revolution, passion stirred inside her, and she vowed to always show her dedication to communism openly and proudly. The aunts and uncles who were supposed to watch over her didn’t do such a good job, and when she was seventeen, Lili became pregnant. She named the child Juan José after his absent father and strong-willed grandfather. She was not at all ready to raise a son. She left the baby, who everyone called Joseíto, with her aunts in Santiago and took off for Havana. She’d heard tales about the great city, where the streets pulsed with excitement, and she wanted to be there.
The old capital deceived many young women from the east who made the journey with great expectations only to find that life there was just as difficult as it had been where they came from. Lili joined her mother in Casablanca, a squatters’ village across the bay from Old Havana. Thousands fleeing the crushing poverty of the eastern provinces built shacks there or set up housing in whatever locations they could find, eventually including an old Soviet power plant. As the capital grew more overcrowded, the government imposed new restrictions, and without authorization to move from their home province, many people became illegal immigrants in their own country. Without the right permits, they couldn’t work, and they did not qualify for either housing or the libreta.
But it was easier in 1979, when Lili moved in with her mother in Casablanca. She was able to find work in the nearby naval hospital, cleaning emergency rooms and operating salons after surgery. She pursued a course at the technological institute attached to a psychiatric hospital in Havana, then returned to the naval hospital, where she did her mandatory social service.
She was at the hospital late one night when an ambulance brought in a military officer who had been injured in a serious crash. The officer needed surgery, but before he was taken to the operating room, Fidel showed up. The hospital staff lined the corridor, buzzing with excitement. Fidel came through acting like just another visitor. He greeted Lili and the rest of the staff, asked how they were, and then inquired about the condition of the injured officer. He was given a surgical mask and gown to put over his uniform so he could enter the prep area where the officer awaited the surgeons. The officer was still conscious, and as Lili watched, Fidel bent over the gurney to tell the badly injured man that everything was going to be all right, the doctors would give him the best of care.
Seeing Fidel up close cemented Lili’s already worshipful admiration for el comandante. She had grown up with heroic stories of the revolution, and she burned with revolutionary fervor. True to her teenage vow, she took part in nearly every rally, every march, every May Day parade. For her, the revolution was a living thing, a force that she could see and feel. It had given her the opportunity to study and provided her with meaningful work. After ten years at the naval hospital, she went to work as a security guard for state enterprises, including Novalum, pulling twelve-hour shifts as night watchman or minding the front desk during the day.
Cuba would never be perfect; Lili knew that. But following the example of Fidel, she believed that Cubans could achieve greatness. “I am a revolutionary communist,” she proudly told anyone who listened. “I like my communism. I like my country.” She was certain that Cuba could have advanced much further if it hadn’t been isolated by the U.S. embargo since before she was born. Despite the hardships that came with being on America’s enemy list, she knew that Cuba had many allies around the world, and it had achieved so much with so little. “Here in our country health care is free. Education is free. Here, if a child gets sick or has a life-threatening illness, it’s something sacred. What am I saying? Not just a child. Older people, anyone who gets sick, they all are taken care of.”
Her faith in the righteousness of the revolution was absolute. She lived with her mother and mentally handicapped sister in Casablanca during the summer of 1994, but she knew little about the sinking of the 13 de Marzo. Unlike Jorge García and María del Carmen, she did not know any of the victims, survivors, or grieving relatives. The government’s explanation that a group of lawbreakers had threatened guards, stolen a decrepit boat, and recklessly tried to make off with the people’s property was all the explanation she needed.
ONE DAY IN THE SPRING OF 2006, Cary was eating lunch with her colleagues, listening to them complain about work. She sat there silently, brooding over her inadequate new position and the discontent welling up inside her. She didn’t get along with the new vice minister she was supposed to assist. It might have been an impossible pairing to begin with—two strong-willed, independent women who were both used to giving orders, not taking them. The stress of dealing with all the same problems but without the authority to make decisions, compounded by the lingering sadness of losing her mother and the growing disillusionment with the imbalances in the socialist system, overcame her.
She got up to leave. “Don’t talk about me when I’m not here,” she told those at the table. “If you have something to say to me, tell me now.”
“Cary, no,” they told her, sensing her distress. “Just sit down. You’ve been awfully tense.”
It might have been the fish she ate, or it might have been the contortions of her spirit, but when she returned to her office, her lunch came up. Cary realized that her body was telling her something. She grabbed a few personal items from her desk, including a photograph of her mother relaxing in the patio of the house in Guanabacoa. Then she called Fran and told him to get the car ready. “I’m going home,” she said.
He drove her around the harbor in the new Kia automobile with white license plates that had been assigned to her as vice minister. When she got to the house, she told Pipo that she had decided to quit her job at the ministry. “Are you crazy?” he said. Without her position and her privileges, the comfortable tableau of their lives would collapse, leaving them all at a loss.
It was a moment of reckoning for Cary. Suddenly the intense sunlight of Cuba seemed to illuminate things she’d never seen before. It was like the time she had asked Fran to drive her to a clinic in Guanabacoa. As they drove up Corralfalso she looked out the car window and noticed a large mound of garbage near Los Escolapios church, almost directly in front of María del Carmen’s house.
“Oye, Fran, what happened here? Where did all this garbage come from?”
“It’s always been there, Cary,” he responded.
“I’ve never seen it.”
“That’s because you never look out the windows. You’ve always got your nose in a report.”
He was right, and Cary knew it. Just as she now knew that Zenaida’s list of her skewed priorities had been accurate all along. She had been living in a bubble of her own creation for so long that she couldn’t recognize the reality of the world around her. There never had been true equality. She’d always had more than others—more vacations, more education, more food, a bigger apartment, a state car and computer. And just as she’d been oblivious to that mound of garbage on Corralfalso, her rigid concept of party loyalty had blinded her to the reality of the Cuba that existed from the dirt roads of Tacajó to the crumbling asphalt of Guanabacoa. She had traveled across the Cuban mainland for her work, and she had seen—though it didn’t register till now—that even at its worst, Havana was an abundance compared to the rest of the island.
Neither discontent nor a lack of loyalty to the revolution fed the transformation taking place inside her. It was the real world that her newly opened eyes were seeing. She was fifty years old, with a chest full of scars, a memory filled with broken promises, and a heart that, though weakened by disease, still brimmed with love for her bedeviled island home. And then, as if to prove that the revolution itself was sick, in July 2006 an ashen-faced broadcaster on the national television news announced that Fidel had been felled by an unnamed illness and would be replaced provisionally as president by his brother Raúl.
The revolution was as old as many of the bulky American cars that lumbered along Cuba’s roads, and like those aging behemoths, Fidel and his revolution barely resembled their original selves. But one thing had always remained constant. For as long as Cary could remember, as long as she’d been alive, every Cuban life, every Cuban moment, every grain of corn or liter of rum produced on the island owed its very existence to the oversize figure of Fidel. There was not a single statue of him in all of Cuba, nor any school or hospital with his name. There didn’t need to be.
Fidel was Cuba.
Cuba was Fidel.
And if Fidel was sick . . .