IF SPANISH LACKED A FUTURE TENSE
It’s a soccer ball covered with ants, to which an unknown player has given a tremendous kick, sending it spinning through space without the ants having the slightest idea where they came from or where they’re going or why. That doesn’t stop the little animals from clinging to the surface or from killing each other so as to keep holding on to the ball and their dreams.
—Carlos Loveira, Juan Criollo
MAYBE EVERYTHING HAS BEEN SAID, but how much of it has been heard?
Of the eighty-two revolutionaries crammed onto the leaky boat that shipwrecked onto Cuban shores on December 2, 1956—twenty-nine years after Loveira’s novel—no more than twenty survived the initial encounter with Batista’s army and succeeded in escaping to the Sierra Maestra mountains. Only twelve men from this group survived to see victory when, on January 1, 1959, Batista fled Cuba for Spain with an estimated three hundred million dollar fortune stolen from the Cuban people. Since that time, some estimates say that there have been 638 attempts on Castro’s life organized on American soil. In 1979, on a historic trip to address the UN General Assembly in New York, Castro was asked about the constant need for protection in light of the assassination attempts.
“Everybody says you always have a bulletproof vest,” the reporter Jon Alpert remarked on the plane ride.
“No.” Castro smiled.
“No?”
Castro leaned back and struggled to unbutton his shirt and reveal his soft, sparsely haired fifty-three-year-old chest.
“I will land in New York like this.” Fidel beamed. “I have a moral one. A moral vest. It’s strong.” He held up a fist. “That one has protected me always. It’s too hot in Cuba to have a bulletproof vest.”
On the afternoon of my last day in Havana, I saw a little girl get bit by a dog in Parque Central in between the tournament fight cards at Kid Chocolate. I watched her from a stone bench beside the Esquina Caliente crowd of men arguing baseball just down the street from the Capitolio. She tried to pet one of these Goya-nightmare stray dogs and it snapped at her hand. She went off like a car alarm, but it was the way she screamed that made the old men give up their arguments and rush over to console her. I had been hypnotized by these men’s bickering my entire visit. I’m convinced that that girl’s ability to distract them from their shouting is the only bona fide miracle I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime. You’ll have to take my word for it, but if the Hot Corner heard Slim Pickens himself was falling from the sky straddling an atomic bomb, slapping his cowboy hat against his hip and yee-hawing his way down onto their heads … there wouldn’t have been a flinch. “We’re talking béisbol here, coño.”
The Esquina Caliente finally cheered her up enough that she smiled and jammed her head against her mom’s shoulder. The men went back to baseball and the mom carried her baby home.
I closed up my notebook and followed the little girl and her mother to Calle Neptuno, where they caught a cab and disappeared.
The last thing I had planned before flying home was to catch an Industriales game at Estadio Latinoamericano with Jesús. It was nearing the end of the Cuban National Baseball League’s ninety-game season. Television in Cuba only has three channels and when baseball or Brazilian soap operas are on, the city shuts down to watch. As much as these people loved boxing, if Teófilo Stevenson came out of retirement to fight the heavyweight champion while a little league game was telecast from any corner of the island, people would riot if anyone dared replace it with boxing. I’ve never loved Americans more than when I see them up close watching a baseball game. It distills one side of their culture and national character in a way nothing else does. It’s like they’re watching their daughter at their first dance recital. And the only people on earth who loved America’s game as much as Americans were these people.
And this was Jesús’s going away present to me. We were going to stop at his dad’s house on the way to say hello. He looked so proud on his way to work, pulling his Industriales cap over his little shaved head after he kissed his wife and boy. That’s when his wife came over to me and told me his dad had terminal cancer and nobody had the heart to tell Jesús yet. It was in his pancreas and there wasn’t much time left. The dread of keeping this information from someone who had been as kind to me as Jesús had been during my stay hung over the rest of my last day. But it’s impossible to hold on to any one feeling for long given the speed that this town dishes them out.
I’d had a laughing fit at the gym that afternoon because I’d mentioned I wanted to meet Félix Savón, the three-time Olympic heavyweight gold medalist, before I left, if it was possible. Most of the coaches at Trejo were either Olympic or Pan American gold medalists themselves or had coached Olympic gold medalists on the national or Olympic team. They knew and enjoyed Savón—everybody knows everybody in Havana anyway—but he was like a sweet little boy, they said. I got the impression that Cuba’s answer to “the baddest man on the planet” was more like Lenny from Of Mice and Men.
“Sure you can meet him!” one coach hollered. “We’ve already talked to him about you. He told us he’d like to meet you in the Presidential Suite at the Nacional this evening. He’ll bring his medals to show you but be careful, he probably won’t wear them around his neck!”
While I was smiling to myself about this, I got to a street corner and noticed a sweaty, filthy old man crawling on the ground like a crab across the intersection. I wasn’t high. I’d been offered plenty of weed by people who, for some unclear reason, insisted on smoking it from their nostrils rather than lips. But I was aware of the years in jail many have spent for so much as a joint and wasn’t keen to tempt fate. Yet, this guy, stone sober as I was, wasn’t evaporating like any mirage under closer inspection. All he had on was a loincloth. It was a busy intersection. Out of maybe two hundred people walking on the sidewalk—the fifteen taxis, ten Chinese bicycle taxis, forty cars, and two horse-drawn carriages on the road—I seemed to possess the only pair of eyes staring. I appeared to be the only person remotely concerned with this man’s role in the universe.
In New York people had arguments with their horns; in Havana they had operas. As the man progressed to the center of the intersection, still in the middle of the street with the cars patiently waiting for him to pass, I noticed there was a rope attached to his ankle tied to something that remained offstage behind a lamppost. I reached into my breast pocket and took out a cigarette, waiting with my match until I saw what he was dragging: a truck’s tire.
Maybe everybody was too busy to notice because, like every other day in Havana, it’s Valentine’s Day year round. You can’t walk anywhere without somebody blowing kisses or whistling or hissing at somebody. If this were the States it would be a sexual harassment lawyer’s wet dream. Yet hardly anybody seems to mind. Cupid was supposed to be a screwed-up kid settling scores with grownups anyway, so it makes sense he’d be mistaken for a local patron saint in this place.
I made my last walk home as I always did, with the sunset glinting off American hubcaps and putting the finishing touches on a stickball game played down an alley, with everyone pleading for just one more out. The sunset got its hooks into the whole overwhelming dripping-wet painting of everything in Havana, and I turned over the same thought I had from the beginning: maybe Cuba is just one dictator’s heartbeat away from becoming like everywhere else. But what if it’s not? How long could this possibly last? How long should it last? It’s a lot easier to theorize about human behavior than it is to look at it.
* * *
In the darkness Jesús lit a match and we started down thirteen flights of stairs inside his parents’ apartment complex’s barren stairwell. The elevator had been broken for years and the power had gone out an hour before we arrived. We kept passing whole families sullenly panting up the stairs toward home. They gasped their hellos.
“The opening first pitch is only a few minutes away.” Jesús laughed. “We have to hurry!”
We’d spent twenty minutes with Jesús’s clandestinely dying father and mom in their apartment. Jesús massaged his mother’s feet while pleading for stories from his father about heroic team feats at ball games they’d attended through the years. “Did you bring me any cigars?” the father asked his son.
Jesús handed over three from his breast pocket and offered a match as his father bit off and chewed the end of a cigar. Halfway through each feat detailed in the story the cigar went out and Jesús had to light another match for his father.
“So.” His father grinned at me devilishly. “My son’s entire life he’s offered me this service. Don’t think I raised him to be my slave. You can ask my wife, I lost my mind when I saw this boy’s face for the first time and I never got it back. He still convinces me I invented for all the world the pleasure of having a son.”
“Then you should come with us to watch the game.” Jesús kissed his cheek.
“I’m a little tired, Jesusito. Another time we’ll go.”
“This man never missed a baseball game I played in my entire life.” Jesús laughed. “Not a stickball game or a pickup game in the park. Never.”
“I told him already.” He slapped his cheek gently. “I was a slave to this boy. Now go enjoy the game while I take a nap with my queen and our ugly-as-sin dogs.”
Right then we all heard the roar of air raid sirens coming from Latinoamericano’s ballpark.
“Vamos, ¡Jesusito! Venga. I don’t care how poor my country is, if you catch a foul ball you keep it and bring it home to me.”
When we finally got outside bicycle spokes whirred by as boys accompanied their girlfriends or younger siblings to the ballpark. Hitchhiking families crammed into wheezing jalopies or whining Ladas for the stadium. While I was evaluating again the old man’s choice to keep his illness from his son, Jesús clapped my shoulder. “You know what El Duque told the Americans when they asked him if he was nervous about pitching at Yankee Stadium?”
“What did he say?” I smiled with relief.
“He said how could anyone be nervous about Yankee Stadium after pitching at Latinoamericano. That’s what he said after he’d left. This experience is going to ruin the rest of sports for all your life. It is going to molest you like a priest! Baseball is the highest religion in my country.”
We joined the immense crowd marching its way into the entrance, liquor and cigars in hand. Latinoamericano could hold over fifty thousand fans and there was not a parking lot in sight. After we paid two Cuban pesos (about ten cents) for our seats, a vendor pushed two raffle tickets toward us from a barred window as if they were crack pipes. “Good seats?” I asked.
“No designated seats inside.” Jesús laughed. “No luxury boxes. No commercial breaks. You’ll see.”
Before we’d gotten inside another clap sounded: tin cans being smashed together, echoing throughout the stadium. A drum started pounding and thousands more people clapped behind its thud. Another siren wailed. We crammed through a narrow tunnel with hundreds all around us and then the expanse of the diamond and outfield unfolded before us, sprinkled with that immaculate constellation of ballplayers and their mitts standing under several furiously burning lights extended by concrete at the angle of fire engine cranes toward a burning building. A three-story logo of Industriales dimly shone from the side of a blue-painted building just beyond the outfield. A ribbon of camouflage green uniforms circumnavigated the crowd where the military had been called out in case anything beyond the usual rioting occurred. As we found our seats behind the reserved government seating, the beat of the drum reached a crescendo and three well-built teenage girls in spandex turned their backs to the field and stuck their asses out to twerk with abandon. Those around them laughed and hollered approval.
“You see that man?” Jesús asked as he raided a tray of peanuts from a vendor. “The only one out of uniform, in the opposing team’s dugout?”
“Yeah.”
“Does his profile look familiar?” Jesús laughed.
“No,” I confessed. “I have no idea who he is.”
“Their team doctor is Fidel’s son.”
“Him?”
“Oh yes.” Jesús giggled. “None of Fidel’s children followed him into politics. I wonder why that is? None of them wanted anything to do with this mess confronting the United States.”
At that point I gave up entirely on trying to follow the game in front of us.
“How hard is it for you to stay here, Jesús?”
“Some of these athletes, when they first got to Florida, did things that amused Americans.” Jesús smiled, cracking open some peanuts. “They bought dog food for their children because they saw a child smiling on the can and had no idea there was special food just for dogs or cats. Some fainted the moment they walked into an American supermarket. Some kept million-dollar checks in their back pocket for days because they didn’t understand anything about banks.”
“You’ve never been away from Cuba?”
“I left with a delegation of engineers to Toronto once. For a week.”
“Was it what you expected?”
“Is Havana what you expected? I was born the same year as the triumph of the revolution. My father was always so proud of this. What he risked his life for in so many ways came true. For the first time since Columbus we were in control of our own destiny. Extreme poverty does not exist. Have you seen any homeless on our streets? I saw many homeless in a rich city like Toronto…”
“I’m waiting for the but.”
“The but is two very precious things. My father and my son. Two very powerfully opposing forces in my life, Brinicito. My father was able to provide me a better life than he enjoyed in so many ways. Can I offer that to my own son here in today’s Cuba?” And then Jesús took a deep breath and concluded the topic the way I’d hear so many fathers sum up the calamity of their albatross. “The greatest joy any Cuban man can know is becoming a father, and our deepest anguish, no matter how hard we try, is not being able to provide for them here. I have never told my father this, but I send in our family’s names to the lottery each year.”
“What lottery?”
“Every year the United States lets twenty thousand of us enter through a lottery to avoid the rafts that leave. All those horrible deaths from the balseros or smugglers’ boats. It’s all so feo. So each year I send in a letter with our names. And if they ever select us I will have to live with the betrayal of my father, which I don’t know how I will ever do. He might never forgive me. But the alternative is betraying my son. And that is something I could never forgive myself for.”
Someone from Industriales hit a home run and everybody in the stadium but us jumped to their feet to see how far it would go.