We were trying to lie our way into Cuba. It wasn’t working.
We were a feminist women’s community chorus from northern New England, a fundamentalist Christian preacher from Nigeria by way of Birmingham, and me, a journalist in disguise.
We were supposed to have left Jamaica three hours earlier, but the Commies wanted their money up front and the reverend was tapped out. The diva was frantic, the chorus was clueless, and the graybeard rasta who’d been watching us all afternoon nodded as if he could have told me: When you start from a lie, every step is a betrayal.
And we were all lying, more or less. Under the embargo, most U.S. citizens can either be honest or travel to Cuba. Some sneak in through Canada or Mexico. Others say and do whatever it takes to squeeze through one of the embargo’s licensed loopholes. For example, a feminist chorus might strike a deal with a fundamentalist pastor licensed to lead missionaries to Cuba. And a freelance writer anxious to see Guantánamo might turn missionary, too.
Maybe some of us crossed our fingers, for lies or for luck. Yet here we were, grounded in Kingston, all our accommodations with truth as tangled as the vines and flowers woven into Ileana’s wild nylons.
Ileana was Cubana Airline’s go-to girl at Kingston’s Norman Manley International Airport. The job title on her name tag, “Sales Manager,” symbolized the peculiar marriage of Marx and marketing forced on Cuba since the Soviet collapse. She embodied, as well, the island’s refusal to equate professionalism with prudery: Though the nylons and short skirt spoke for small-c cubana flair, from there on up Ileana looked every centimeter the corporate cadre in her blue blazer, thin smile, and cinched-back bun. Her rigid bearing did more than her few words to press the airlines’ demand: Unless the Reverend Esau came up with another U.S. $1,100, our charter to Santiago de Cuba would never fly.
“Lo siento,” Ileana told me: Sorry about that. But she didn’t bother backing her lie with so much as a polite moue of sorrow. She wore the turned-to-stone face that Cuban officials often use on unofficial Cubans and uppity Americans. “There is nothing I can do.”
Still, I kept her talking, putting my artless Spanish to the trip’s first test as I tried to understand just how much trouble we were in.
Lots, it seemed. Without a trace of sympathy, Ileana explained that Jamaica collects a head tax on departing charter passengers. Cubana would owe the money to Jamaica, and the airline had no intention of fronting the Reverend Esau Onyegoro’s Overwater Missions such a sum.
I turned to ask Esau, in English, “You don’t have this charter-tax money?” I tried to keep my pitch level, expressing nothing at all like surprise or accusation.
“No, William.” Esau’s shoulders slumped, a curve as soft as the contours of his kind, fleshy face. “We had all the arrangements made weeks ago,” he said, lowering his voice until he was sure that only I could hear him through the departure lounge’s high babel. “Then the Cubans switched the date, and it was too late to change your flight here. So I booked overnight rooms in Kingston, an unexpected expense, and that required a nonrefundable deposit.
“But then the Cubans changed the date again,” the reverend marveled, haplessly. “They say they can fly us today only! And the hotel won’t give me our money back.”
There was something wrong with Esau’s story, but I could see that we were losing Ileana. Switching back to Spanish, I asked her whether our Cubana plane was here in Kingston, waiting for us.
“Quizas.” Perhaps.
Was it ready to fly?
“I can’t say.”
Was there a time after which it would leave Jamaica, with or without us?
“Certainly.” She walked away, the florid nylons twining into the crowd. Turning back, I caught the reverend watching, too.
When America meets Cuba, you can never tell who’s lying. Considering their shared centuries of snarled double crosses, it’s safe to assume the dishonesty is mutual.
At that moment, for instance, I was wondering whether there really was such a thing as a Jamaican departing-charter head tax. And was it really $1,100, or were Ileana and the man I could see her consulting with—a sharp-featured, short guy in an ill-fitting Cubana jacket—angling after an off-the-books bonus? Who could I ask, and what would it matter? Catching the Cubans out in a fib might set the facts straight, but it wouldn’t get us to Santiago.
And what about Esau? How had he managed to screw this up? Was he less than competent or less than honest? Problem was, we needed the Reverend Onyegoro a lot more than he needed us.
The chorus—the earnestly named Feminine Tone—wanted to sing at Santiago’s Eighth International Choral Festival. The chorus’s Cuban-born founder and director, Maricel Lucero Keniston, wanted to see her aging aunts in Santiago and Havana. And I was hitching a ride on my way to Guantánamo, via San Juan Hill and other shrines of 1898’s “splendid little war.”
We all needed Esau, because in 2005 there were damned few ways an American citizen could legally visit Cuba.
The forty-four-year-old trade U.S. embargo doesn’t actually prohibit travel to the island. We Americans don’t like to think we can’t go where we please. We do, however, respect the tabu mojo of money. So our government allows us to journey to Cuba at will—but forbids us to spend a single dollar while we’re there. We may not legally buy a meal, a souvenir, or a bed for the night without a license from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
There used to be a lot of OFAC licenses out there.
Though the embargo has been in effect since before the Bay of Pigs invasion, and various U.S. and Cuban actions—from the 1962 missile crisis to proxy wars and interventions in the Congo and Angola—kept tensions uncomfortably high well into the ’80s, the undeniable logic of talking to your neighbor kept OFAC permits multiplying through the years. Tens of thousands of Cuban expatriates and Cuban Americans were allowed to visit island family. Businessmen, journalists, and other individuals could get one-off permissions, and OFAC granted hundreds of institutions the right to send travelers wholesale. Colleges sent students and faculty; arts organizations sent dance troupes and string quartets; sports associations, basketball teams and fencers. Charities sent aid workers; churches, missionaries. By the end of the Clinton administration, tens of thousands of active OFAC licenses made Cuban travel something less than common but more than rare.
The 2000 Bush campaign had implied that a George W. Bush administration would normalize relations with Cuba, but that was before far-right Miami Cubans helped GOP operatives disrupt recounts of disputed Florida ballots, sometimes breaking into election commission offices to scatter chads to the winds. Such favors helped get Bush appointed president, and his administration got tougher with Cuba than any since Nixon’s.
Decades’ worth of OFAC licenses were revoked or not renewed. First to go, understandably, were the permits of de facto travel agencies—many based in Canada—that had long worn the fig leaf of “cultural exchange facilitation” to sell package tours. Soon, however, even businesses and universities with long-standing—and diplomatically useful—connections to Cuba lost their licenses. The process accelerated after 9/11, and by November 19, 2005—the day the chorus got stuck in Kingston—licenses were almost impossible to obtain.
Only one loophole had been slow to close: “faith-based travel.” And not just any faith. Mainstream Christian organizations, which had provided the lion’s share of practical aid to Cuba for decades, were shut out at the recommendation of the administration’s new Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba. (The appointment of a study group for Cuba policy seemed ominous; the recommendations of a “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq” became policy with the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.) But fundamentalist organizations such as the Reverend Esau Onyegoro’s Overwater Missions, were still in the Cuba business, shepherding yanquis down for a week or two of ennobling early-morning labor, painting churches or laying cinder block, followed by long afternoons and evenings trying not to take too much pleasure in Paradise.
All of this didn’t quite explain why the twenty-four members of a women’s choir recruited from blue-state Vermont and red New Hampshire’s bleeding-heart enclave in the hills around Dartmouth College—most of them agnostics, Unitarian Universalists, lapsed Christians, Green Mountain Buddhists, or avid self-taught pagans—would put their dream of attending Santiago’s International Choral Festival in the hands of a Birmingham-based fundamentalist minister whose church proclaims the literal truth of every word in the Bible, from the six-day Creation to Revelation’s encrypted disasters.
Nor did it explain why the Reverend Esau, whose church’s view of women stresses the subordinacy of Adam’s lost rib and the wiles of the Whore of Babylon, would put his license on the line for a choir devoted to one-world feminist anthems and traveling with its assorted hyphenated spouses, children of first marriages, and lesbian life partners.
How had these antitheses made even a moment’s common cause, gotten even as far as this breakdown moment in Kingston?
The answer was Maricel.
Maricel Lucero Keniston was born in Santiago de Cuba, a few weeks after her father disappeared. Oscar Lucero Moya was, according to survivors of the Revolution’s bleakest days, one of Cuba’s boldest revolutionaries, a leader in the fight against dictator Fulgencio Batista’s U.S.-supported kleptocracy. Comrade-in-arms and biographer Renán Ricardo Rodríguez describes Oscar, just thirty years old in 1958, as a hero, “unforgettable, valiant” and already “battle-wise.”
Oscar didn’t live to celebrate Batista’s flight to Miami, just ahead of the rebels’ entrance into Havana, or join the street parties on January 1, 1959, when Fidel Castro declared the triumph of the Revolution from a balcony overlooking Santiago’s central plaza. By then, Oscar had already been missing for months, arrested by secret policemen on April 28. His body was never found. Searchers learned, however, that Oscar never told his torturers a thing, never gave up a name, never endangered his comrades, the Revolution, or his hope of a just and free Cuba. The Revolutionary government declared Oscar Lucero Moya one of its martyred Heroes of Silence. Schools are named after him; children write poems in his memory.
Born into the Revolution’s dawn, Maricel grew up a hero’s daughter. A picture in Ricardo’s biography of her father shows the infant frowning during a 1959 ceremony unveiling a memorial bust of Oscar. Tragedy’s limelight shone on “the martyr’s daughter,” a petite, dramatically wide-eyed little girl, projecting expectations and promising a favored place in revolutionary society. But it didn’t protect her as the Revolution turned avowedly Communist and militantly atheistic. Even the family of a Hero of Silence couldn’t get away with open adherence to its Baptist faith, which seemed to go hand-in-hand with criticizing Castro for breaking his promise of democracy. Perhaps it was the last flicker of the martyr’s halo that allowed Oscar’s widow, Blanca, her new husband, and their family to leave Cuba safely, when Maricel was eight.
Blanca was done with Cuba, but she had no sympathy for the rightists in exile in Miami, either. She raised Maricel in New Jersey, speaking English even at home, deliberately avoiding Cuban foods, culture, and concerns. Maricel turned out to have a lovely soprano singing voice, a real gift, but never heard a Cuban rhythm growing up, never even a Spanish melody.
When Maricel, forty-one and living in Vermont, was completing her master’s in voice at Dartmouth College, she took a class with Hafiz Shabazz, a Philadelphia-born musician of Jamaican heritage who had steeped himself in music of the African diaspora. Only then, in the course’s routine study of Afro-Cuban rhythm and the island’s melodic son, did she hear music that brought back the sounds and sensations of her childhood—and all the feelings that went with them.
Maricel finished her master’s work focusing on Cuban classical music. She founded a women’s community chorus with a repertoire rich in Latin American songs. And she found the courage to tell Blanca that she was traveling to Cuba, going back one way or another, to see her father’s family and recover something of all that had been lost.
And she’d done it, first on her own and then again and again with the Feminine Tone in tow, despite her mother’s fear and the Cuban government’s official hostility to returned “traitors.” The Feminine Tone had traveled under a cultural exchange license in 2001, when I’d accompanied it as a newspaper reporter. On that trip, I met Kathleen, a birthing nurse and FemTone alto. Kathy and I were married in 2002; this trip, she was staying at home with the teenage daughters of our blended family.
Maricel had returned to Cuba as often as she could through the Clinton years, and when the Bush administration started denying family contact and cultural exchange licenses, she’d redefined the chorus’s travel to fit other OFAC categories, such as faith-based humanitarian aid. This 2005 trip was her sixth. Maricel’s determined planning and unyielding energy had brought her—and the chorus and its friends, all of us—to within a puddle jump of Santiago.
Now everything depended on Esau, but he seemed to want to depend on me.
“I don’t know what to do, William,” he said.
“Can’t Overwater Missions wire you the money?”
“I don’t think so. No, we don’t have that kind of money,” he decided. “It’s project by project, you see? And this mission, I’m already overextended trying to help you people. William, I am overwhelmed.”
I patted his shoulder, but I was thinking less-than-comforting thoughts. The reverend felt overextended, overwhelmed? Already? Wait, I reckoned, ’til the chorus catches on.
The Feminine Tone and friends were scattered around Norman Manley’s glass-fronted, swoop-roofed international departure terminal, camped in far corners and clumped along the walls, trying both to stay together and to stay out of the way. Stunned by successive transitions—a freezing midnight rendezvous with a charter bus in White River Junction, Vermont, the dawn-patrol bustle of boarding at JFK, the overly air-conditioned flight and the sucker punch of Jamaican heat as we’d stumbled across the dazzling runway—they’d been chatting or snoozing through the terminal’s afternoon hurly-burly, having somehow accepted on faith the notion that nothing was wrong, that tropical charters never leave on time.
I looked from group to group, trying to poll their faces. They were trusting souls, as willing and kindly a selection of citizens as I could ever hope to travel with. No one seemed acutely worried. No one was looking our way, wondering why the reverend looked so glum. But then, there was so much else to see.
The terminal was beyond busy, because for Jamaicans international travel is still much more than submission to the dreary indignities of being packed and shipped from point A to point B. Everywhere I looked, vignettes were unfolding, gaudy characters demanding our attention. Families cheered departing sons and daughters. Solo travelers opened their cell phones with urgent flourishes, shouted into the digital ether to help every involuntary eavesdropper appreciate the burden of being ceaselessly essential. Many wore travel costumes. There were men in wide-lapeled, bell-bottomed Shaft in Africa safari suits not seen elsewhere since Ali fought Foreman in Zaire. Lots of younger men affected U.S. B-boy styles at least a decade old, shuffling in pants baggy as unpegged tents, on laceless sneakers insecure as geisha sandals.
The women were self-confident and stunning in a variety of shapes, their earth-goddess and vixen roles equally convincing whether the actress swelled like a gourd or swayed like bamboo. One stout woman with processed hair swept back in an Elvis pompadour wore a motorcycle suit of zip-tight red leatherette. A short, powerful woman with an unusual, freckled-chocolate complexion emphasized her Nordic touch with bright gold-painted braids, hair twisted out into bullion swoops apparently solid as water buffalo horns. People got out of her way.
People were staying out of Maricel’s way, too. Esau had yet to tell her about the unpaid charter tax, but just an hour earlier he had reluctantly warned her of another difficulty: According to Ileana, Cubana was sending a plane that could carry only half as much luggage as we’d brought. A few giant steps from where I stood with my hand on Esau’s shoulder, the sparrow-boned soprano was clambering over our enormous pile of luggage, yanking heavy bags around with strength born of indignation, trying to decide which loads of donated clothing and medicine we’d leave behind in Kingston, to be lost or pilfered. Just then she was a force no one wanted to reckon with.
Esau knew how powerful Maricel’s moods could be. It was Maricel’s repeated, not-taking-no-for-an-answer calls to Overwater Missions, her relentless sales pitch (stressing the chorus’s spiritual interests, downplaying their diversity), and, finally, her impassioned recounting of her family story that had persuaded him to take the FemTone on.
You think you feel overwhelmed and overextended now? Just wait, I wanted to scold him, until Maricel realizes she’s not going home this time. Esau didn’t know from overwhelming. Not yet.
As for overextended, well, the reverend wasn’t the only one forced out on a limb by the crazy logic of U.S.-Cuban travel. Like Maricel, I’d been looking for routes that skirted our government’s increasing ill will. I’d recently published an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe accusing the administration of racial profiling and scaremongering at a Border Patrol installation on Interstate 91 in central Vermont. Maybe it mattered, maybe it didn’t, but when I requested a journalist’s license for this trip, OFAC turned me down. My application had been backed by Vermont’s top weekly; once again, I’d had support from the offices of Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative Bernie Sanders. Of course, Vice President Dick Cheney had recently told Leahy to go fuck himself—on the Senate floor, no less—and independent socialist Sanders was openly sneered at in Speaker Dennis Hastert’s House. Perhaps I’d had the wrong help.
For whatever reason, the same OFAC that had given me a journalist’s license in 2000 turned me down in 2005. This time only the Cuban government offered me journalist’s credentials. So I found myself taking a required phone interview with the tour-guide preacher Maricel had found, hoping to travel as a missionary.
I may have soft-pedaled my politics to the Reverend Onyegoro, but I had no trouble rationalizing my use of his faith-based license. I was traveling on faith alone, freelancing on spec, with no assignment to cover my expenses, but I had to get back to Cuba.
My need was irrational, undeniable. I wasn’t even sure when it had started.
Like billions of people around the world, I’d been horrified by the atrocities of 9/11, and accepted war in Afghanistan as a bleak necessity. But I couldn’t support an axiomatically endless “war on terror,” and I was sickened by revelations of kidnapping and torture at Guantánamo and a murky galaxy of secret prisons scattered across the continents. Like hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of our best friends overseas, I’d marched and waved protest signs in the run-up to the Iraq War, only to realize that the president and his advisers had no intention of letting protesters, the law, or mere truth get in their way.
In all this, though I may have been among the minority of my fellow Americans, I was hardly alone. Regardless of what we believed, our 9/11 fears and angers—deliberately stoked by administration officials, tirelessly fed by the news and entertainment industry—were still blazing away. The body politic was staring into the bonfire, enthralled by the constant flaring and dying of threats and rescues, the flame-colored alerts, sparkling shoe-bomber fuses, and mushroom-cloud puffs from smoking guns. Most of us were kept far too worried to risk turning our backs on the flickering show, to wonder what was happening in the shadows beyond the glare.
When the Global War on Terror began, I was working for a daily newspaper serving central Vermont and New Hampshire. If I questioned the war in editorials, op-eds, and book reviews, I was either preaching to the choir or angering people who just turned the page or canceled their subscriptions. The paper was kind to me as I reassembled myself after a difficult divorce, and more than patient with my antiwar vehemence, but I finally resigned.
I’d lost faith. Not in my smart and steady colleagues, but in “objective” journalism. Many fine journalists have been taught to abstain from voting, lest they contaminate their professional ethics by “taking sides.” Many more are careful to “balance” facts with opposing views, even at the risk of obscuring the facts’ import. But objectivity is meaningless if we have no perspective on our own fears and prejudices, if we can’t recognize the pervasive bias of our history and culture. After more than a century’s striving for “objectivity,” the news industry enthusiastically amplified the Bush administration’s most preposterous fabrications, from Iraq-Al Qaeda links to WMDs. If that’s objective journalism, then objectivity is irresponsible and immoral. I didn’t know whether I’d be able to put together a living’s worth of steady freelance work, but I wanted to be both a writer and a citizen, to get the facts straight and be free to do something about them.
If I could figure out what to do.
I had no illusions about the effectiveness of waving signs on street corners. To my mind, protest is a civic obligation, like paying taxes and voting. You do it whether your side is winning or losing, because democracy doesn’t work if the losers shut up and stay home. But the invasion of Iraq made civil debate almost impossible. It didn’t matter that the bungled occupation revealed the administration’s bad faith and incompetence; watching Iraq collapse into chaos and civil war only made most Americans all the more desperately insistent that we all “support the troops.”
Some were, understandably, more desperate than others.
For the Iraq War’s anniversary, I organized a roadside, lunch-hour protest on our region’s busiest box-store shopping strip. Not long after we’d set up, a driver jerked his pickup to the curb, rolled down a window, and screamed bloody murder at me and my sign and all the people standing there in the snow.
A gaunt black Irishman, he looked to be in his late forties, just like me. His face blanched by rage, he shouted his certainty that U.S. soldiers were dying in Iraq to save our worthless, cowardly asses, to stop Saddam from orchestrating another devastating attack on United States, “like he did on 9/11, you stupid fucks.” As he yanked the truck back into traffic we saw the yellow-ribbon magnets and the bumper sticker: “Proud Parent of a Marine,” silver letters and the golden anchor and globe.
He couldn’t know it, but he and I had something in common. By then, Kathy and I knew that her son Brendan—who’d signed up with the Marines in 2000 and started his five-year hitch in the summer of 2001—was on his way to Iraq. We already knew a little of what that father seemed to know, what so many of our neighbors and co-workers knew. It was a new way of fearing the news and its horrors, of resenting power’s careless lethality, of hating every kind of uncertainty and doubt.
I didn’t know what to do. But somewhere in there, somewhere between the invasion and the first release of Abu Ghraib torture photographs, I’d found myself thinking something as irrational as anything that angry father had come to believe.
I had to go to Guantánamo.
Maybe there was a story waiting there. The family legend of my great-grandfather “Papa” O’Brien’s Spanish-American War service had inspired me to read up on 1898 as a boy and again as a student of American history. I’d been to Cuba before and seen our forgotten legacy written not only on plaques and monuments but in ballparks and Baptist churches and bitter smiles. And in all the post-9/11 reporting on the “detention center” at Guantánamo Bay, I’d seen little or nothing about how the United States came to possess this corner of Cuba, the first piece of overseas real estate we ever took and refused to give back.
Maybe nobody was bothering to write about it because 9/11 was supposed to have “changed everything,” transcending history. Yet our response to the attacks had taken us right back to 1898, to the spot where we ditched our republican ideals for the charms of empire. Now America was using “Gitmo” to experiment with life outside the Constitution, beyond the reach of law, liberated from compunctions about torture.
It was spooky, the way we’d circled around on ourselves, the way Guantánamo was once again the place where we’re deciding who we really are.
Some people wait outside prisons when inmates are executed. Some stand by the gates of desert nuclear weapons sites, outside abortion clinics, in front of bishops’ mansions or corporations’ headquarters. Some of us need to see Ground Zero at Alamogordo or in lower Manhattan.
In late November 1963, some Americans drove cross-country for two days straight just to stand along Pennsylvania Avenue as JFK’s coffin rolled by. Their view of the procession may have been blocked by the crowd or their own tears. It didn’t matter. Being there was a compulsive act of witness to our loss, to national disaster.
Sometimes we don’t know what we’ve lost until we touch the scars.
My own government would make it hard to get to Cuba, impossible to visit the base. The Cubans might let me approach from their side, but how close? Perhaps I’d only be able to look through binoculars. It didn’t matter. I felt compelled to get as close as possible to Gitmo, just to see the place where my country was betraying itself.
I’m an old-school, peace-and-justice Catholic, gratefully dependent on faith and skeptical of institutional power. I’m pretty damned sure that Jesus commands us to comfort the afflicted and afflict those made comfortable by other people’s misery. I didn’t know what I’d see that would be worth writing home about, but in Cuba you can travel as a pilgrim travels, confident that the journey itself will be a revelation, that signs will appear along the way.
So I was going, and legally, too, thanks to Esau. The reverend had promised to provide license extensions that would allow Maricel, her accordion accompanist, Walter Gomez, and me to stay in Cuba after the chorus went home. We’d travel together to Havana; then I’d return to Santiago for a third week’s research on my own. Esau had met us here in Kingston without those extensions, but he’d assured me that all was well. His staff was still cleaning up a few details, and the extensions would be faxed to our Santiago hotel.
Now, hours later, still stuck in the terminal, it occurred to me that if his assurances were as unreliable as his accountancy, I might never see those extension forms. But unless I found some way to please Ileana, I might never get close enough to Cuba to need them.
A rattlebone rasta stood by the front door. He was very thin, and his knit red, green, and black cap enclosed a mass of dreads so high and broad as to resemble a pharaonic crown. He seemed to have some relationship with the airport redcaps that enabled him to hang around the building’s street door, where tourists and travelers might place a dollar in his just slightly outstretched hand. In between such opportunities, he watched the spectacle of comings and goings.
Early on, we’d noticed each other noticing each other, and nodded respectfully. Now he made eye contact again, this time following through with a shrug that was half consolation—Whatcha gonna do?—and half I told you so. I returned it, as if ambivalence were some kind of universal middle-aged-guy salute, and at last we both smiled.
Behind him, a frieze of Jamaican faces pressed against the glass wall, hands cupped around eyes, staring after friends, at the drama of departure, at the dream of elsewhere. Beyond the terminal, the Blue Mountains’ long shadows climbed the palms lining the road to Kingston Town. Afternoon was fast becoming evening; the business day was shutting down. I could see that if our problem wasn’t settled soon, the people with the power to make deals would go home, the Cubana plane would fly back to Santiago without us, and we’d be sleeping God knows where until we could start standing by for seats on tomorrow’s flights back to JFK.
If Santiago de Cuba seemed near and yet far, I at least had the consolation of historical perspective. Research into U.S.-Cuban relations had taught me that Kingston has always been tantalizingly, dangerously close to Santiago.
Tantalizing because, rich as Jamaica has ever been, it never could compete with Cuba’s claim to be Queen of the Antilles; Kingston merchants, pirates, and smugglers alike longed for a closer acquaintance with the Spanish colony’s treasures. Dangerous because Santiago is the historic heart of Cuban rebellion, and Kingston—just two hundred deepwater miles to the south—is the perfect staging port for filibusters, gunrunners, and desperate patriots.
That’s why the War of 1898—the one we Americans call the “Spanish-American War”—almost started in November 1873.
On October 31 of that year, the Spanish man-of-war Tornado gave chase to an American-registered freighter named Virginius off Morant Bay, Jamaica, a favorite smugglers’ hidey-hole just a few miles east of Kingston. The Virginius was a gunrunner, notorious for reinforcing Cuba’s insurrectos with arms purchased by the Cuban rebel junta in exile in New York City. She’d eluded the Spanish Navy for three years, but perhaps this time someone in the New York command had been careless—or greedy. Somehow or other, the Tornado had known just where and when to pounce.
Both ships were built for speed. During our Civil War, the Union blockade of Southern ports had created a business opportunity for daring smugglers. Blockade runners sailed some of the world’s fastest, tightest ships, the expense of their state-of-the-art technology justified by fantastic profits. The Virginius had started life as the Virgin, a sidewheel steamer purpose-built in England to outrun any ship in the Union fleet. Her successes won an illicit fame that brought her builders more business; the same English firm created other blockade runners, including the Tornado.
Now both ships were fighting in another civil war, a Cuban rebellion that had begun on October 10, 1868, in the hamlet of Yara, when an idealistic lawyer and tobacco plantation owner, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, issued the Grito de Yara, the “Cry of Yara,” a call for independence from Spain. Céspedes freed his slaves and exhorted them to join the struggle. The next day, Céspedes and his rebel band were all but wiped out by Spanish soldiers, but he and a few survivors—apocryphally, a disciple-like dozen—carried on the fight as the grito was answered by patriots all across the island. Always short of guns and bullets, the rebel army soon developed its signature, surprisingly effective tactic: the carga al machete, the machete charge, devastating when launched from a jungle ambush. Spain sent for reinforcements, and a revolutionary government elected Céspedes “president of the Cuban republic in arms.”
The war divided the island by class, race, and region, with plenty of ambiguous overlap. The mambi army drew its greatest strength from Oriente Province, Cuba’s easternmost, poorest, and blackest province. (Mambi was a nickname applied by Spanish troops who had fought rebels led by a black Spanish renegade, Juan Ethininius Mamby, in Santo Domingo in the 1840s. Then Cuba’s rebels adopted machete tactics that reminded Spaniards of the Dominican war. Los mambises, “the Men of Mamby,” became Spanish imperial troops’ generic label for Caribbean peasant revolutionaries, just as haji covers a multitude of Muslims for U.S. troops in the Middle East today. And, like “Yankee-Doodle,” the nickname mambi was cheerfully adopted by the rebellious peasants who were supposed to resent it.) Céspedes and other white liberals were joined in arms by mulattoes and liberated slaves. Some mambises wanted an independent Cuban republic; others favored annexation by the United States. While the rebels tended to be Cuban-born, the Spanish drew loyalist strength from peninsulares—Spanish-born immigrants—and conservative Cubans, notably sugarcane planters whose estates couldn’t function without numerous slaves.
The rebels needed foreign supplies to keep fighting, and running the Spanish blockade was brisk business. Profit margins were, however, much skimpier in the service of Cuban libertad than they had been in the service of King Cotton. The rebel junta’s ships may have skimped on maintenance; in any case, Virginius had been used too hard for too many years. As she strained to flee Tornado’s ambush, her seams began to open. The pumps couldn’t keep up. During an eight-hour chase, crewmen threw guns and ammunition overboard; when the firemen ran out of coal, they stoked the boilers with bacon and ham. Nothing they did could stop Tornado from closing the distance and firing a plank-smashing hit that promised immediate destruction.
Virginius surrendered her 103 passengers—almost all Cuban rebels, including Colonel Pedro Céspedes, brother of the revolution’s leader, and Brigadier General George Washington Ryan, an American volunteer—and her crew of 52 American and British sailors. Her commander, Captain Joseph Fry, a veteran of the U.S. and Confederate navies, protested that Virginius was “an American ship, carrying American colors and papers, with an American captain and an American crew.” In response, Spanish tars hauled down and gleefully defiled Virginius’s American flag.
Their gesture signaled Spanish exasperation with American interference in Cuba. Having lost almost all their Latin American possessions, the Spanish intended to hold on to Cuba, clinging not only to her queenly wealth but also to the remnants of their imperial pride. Yet the United States seemed to view Cuba as a future star on its flag, an inevitable acquisition over which the Spanish were exercising a temporary, inept stewardship.
The Founding Fathers had avidly discussed the wisdom of purchasing Cuba cheap—or taking it outright. The island’s proximity and strategic location, commanding the most important approaches to the Gulf of Mexico (and thus all the trade the new nation would float to the mouth of the Mississippi), argued for the necessity of U.S. possession. Thomas Jefferson couched his Cuba policy in language that smacked of cool seduction. Rather than fight Britain or Spain for Cuba, he told James Madison, “It is better to lie still in readiness to receive that interesting incorporation when solicited by herself.”
The Cuban temptation seemed to grow stronger with each U.S. generation, becoming something of an obsession. John Quincy Adams thought owning Cuba “indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself.” In 1843, Secretary of State Daniel Webster grew panicky over fantastic rumors of a plot by rogue English diplomats and antislavery activists to arm an invasion force of free Jamaican blacks and make Cuba “a black Military Republic under British protection.” However delusional, such worries were bound to arise again and again, given the American conviction, later voiced by William Henry Seward, “that this nation can never safely allow the island of Cuba to pass under the dominion of any power that is already, or can become, a formidable rival or enemy.”
Why this fixation on control? It’s true that, on the map, Cuba appears to command the entrances to the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the Grand Bahama Bank and the Straits of Florida. But appearances are deceptive. No European power ever seriously imagined that it could support a Cuba-based naval blockade of U.S. access to the gulf. On the contrary: The United States’ many East Coast ports “outflank” Cuba and dominate its Atlantic approaches. Rather than Cuba presenting a blockade menace, it is the United States that has Cuba surrounded. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis demonstrated that even the Soviet Union’s huge navy had no chance of challenging a U.S. blockade of the island. Like many excuses for imperial ambition, the supposed strategic “threat” posed by Cuba’s location has always been more fanciful than actual.
Webster’s fear of an “Ethiopico-Cuban Republic” illuminated another, far more potent geopolitical motive for America’s Cuban compulsion. He believed that with “600,000 blacks in Cuba, and 800,000 in her West India Islands,” Britain could “strike a death blow at the existence of slavery in the United States.” With every year that America failed to find a political cure for its dependence on slavery, Cuba loomed larger as a possible Achilles’ heel—or, in some minds, a panacea.
If Spain—or a meddlesome Britain or France—should free Cuba’s slaves, plantation owners in Southern states imagined their own slaves rising in irrepressible rebellion. But as long as Spain preserved slavery, Southerners felt less isolated in the practice of their “peculiar institution.” And then there was the dream of adding Cuba to the United States. Slaveholding states gloried in visions of gaining those “600,000 blacks,” each of whom was, according to the Constitution, disenfranchised and yet worth three-fifths of a white person when the Census counted heads for proportional representation in Congress. Some freesoilers shared the slavers’ enthusiasm for acquiring Cuba, though not as a state. Both before and after the Civil War, an annexed Cuba was one of the proposed destinations (along with Liberia and Santo Domingo) for the deportation of all of America’s nearly five million blacks, a process that would—in the minds of many white thinkers, including, at one point, Abraham Lincoln—solve the race problem at a stroke.
One way or another, young America usually discussed Cuba’s future as if the Spanish—not to mention the Cubans—had nothing to do with it. This bullheaded passion flared up periodically, often when economic crisis or political pressure seemed to make a foreign-policy distraction especially welcome.
For example, Webster’s alarm over a black republic came at the weary tail end of a long depression following the Panic of 1837. Then, in 1854, as the proposed Kansas-Nebraska Act forced an unprecedentedly vicious political battle over the expansion of slavery, the Spanish seized a U.S. vessel, Black Warrior, in Havana Bay for lack of proper paperwork. The affair gave Southern fireeaters a chance to call for invasion, and it escalated after then ambassador to Spain Pierre Soulé met with James Buchanan and John Mason, ministers, respectively, to England and France, in Ostend, Belgium, to discuss U.S. Cuban policy.
Their report reflected mainstream Democratic Party sentiment, which Franklin Pierce had expressed in his 1853 inaugural speech: Democrats had no patience with “timid forebodings of evil from expansion.” Still, the ambassadors’ opinion, which became known as the “Ostend Manifesto,” shocked Northerners and European powers by its unapologetic greed and thuggery.
A masterpiece of hypocrisy, the manifesto expressed infinite concern for our “oppressed neighbors” in Cuba and claimed that the United States “have never acquired a foot of territory except by fair purchase” or the “free and voluntary application” of people “who desired to blend their destinies with our own.” Declaring Cuba “as necessary to the North American republic as any of its present members” and raising the potent fear that freedom for Cuban slaves could somehow “spread like wildfire” to the Southern states, the ministers wrote that the United States should buy Cuba if Spain were willing and the price right. If not, the United States “shall be justified in wresting it from Spain if we possess the power.”
Though the Ostend Manifesto’s lack of subtlety embarrassed the Pierce administration, Democrats went on to make the acquisition of Cuba a plank in their party’s 1856 platform. If they hoped to distract the nation from internal troubles, they were disappointed. The Black Warrior’s paperwork problems had been resolved, and civil war in “Bleeding Kansas” was focusing the nation’s belligerence inward.
The people of the United States wouldn’t return their attention to Cuba for several apocalyptic years. Then the Grito de Yara sounded in 1868, three years after Appomattox, attracting the military talents, frustrated energies, idealism, and ambitions of men such as Captain Fry and George Washington Ryan. Cuban rebels depended on money, arms, and volunteers from expatriate Cubans and sympathizers in the United States. The federal government was fighting the social and political wars of Reconstruction and was far too busy to chase after violations of its neutrality. Numerous American citizens joined the mambis or engaged in schemes to undermine Spanish rule. Even Trumbull White, a prominent Gilded Age journalist and the unabashedly jingoist author of Our War with Spain for Cuba’s Freedom, conceded that both before and after Virginius’s capture, “Filibustering was constant and scarcely discouraged by the people of the United States.”
When they weren’t risking a lot for a little by bringing arms and reinforcements to the rebels, Yankee smugglers were making big-time money defying Madrid’s monopolistic taxes. It was cheaper to ship a barrel of American flour to Spain for taxation and transshipment to Cuba than it was to ship the same barrel directly to Havana, incurring a Spanish levy many times the flour’s worth. Bold smugglers couldn’t resist the opportunity to sell goods directly and illegally to Cuban consumers, and the Spanish Navy found the smugglers’ insolence as infuriating as the Spanish Army did the presence of Yankee soldiers of fortune in the Cuban rebels’ ranks.
Virginius’s capture offered Spain a rare opportunity to confront official America with its citizens’ unofficial crimes. For starters, the crippled ship was towed into the nearest Spanish port: the beautiful, spectacularly embayed harbor of Santiago de Cuba. Four days after the capture, four passengers—including George Washington Ryan and Pedro Céspedes—were executed by firing squad. The corpses were beheaded, and the heads stuck on poles and paraded through the streets by Spanish loyalists.
That the four were Cuban mambi officers, “traitors” long since condemned to death in absentia, didn’t change the diplomatic dilemma this news presented to President Grant and his secretary of state, Hamilton Fish. An American ship had been taken in neutral waters; its captors had killed four men protected, under international law, by American sovereignty.
Spain might have gotten away with making an example of the four rebels. After all, Virginius was well known to be little better, from a legal standpoint, than a pirate ship, its American owner merely a front for the revolutionary junta. Spain had been struggling for five years to put down this latest outbreak of Cuba’s generations-old rebellion, and the Spanish were in a bloodthirsty mood. Their hold on the countryside around Santiago was so insecure that the island’s governor, Count Valmaseda, had recently issued a decree: “Every man over fifteen found beyond his farm will be shot, unless his absence can be justified. Every uninhabited hut will be burned. Every hamlet not hoisting a white cloth … will be reduced to ashes.”
“I hope,” Secretary of State Fish had written to Admiral José Polo de Bernabé, Spain’s Washington ambassador, “the document is a forgery.”
But Valmaseda’s order was an authentic indication of Spain’s attitude toward rebels—and those who aided them. Before Grant and Fish had formulated a response to the killing of the four mambi officers, word came that the Spanish had executed thirty-seven of Virginius’s crew, the majority of them American citizens.
Like the first four captives, they’d been marched to a slaughterhouse on the city’s edge. According to at least one American witness, Captain Fry’s men were ordered to kneel at the edge of a trench by the slaughterhouse wall. Fry went along the line, saying good-bye to each man—“even the colored men who sailed among the crew”—and then knelt down himself. Fry “took off his hat and turned his face upward, as if in prayer.” When the Spanish marines fired, they killed some outright, including Fry, who was shot through the heart. But more writhed in agony. The Spaniards rushed forward and began hacking at the wounded men with swords and knives. Some pushed rifles into eyes and mouths and shot the prisoners again. Then a cavalry was ordered to trample the surviving crewmen to death, a process that took several bone-crunching passes. Finally, the bodies were abandoned to the loyalist crowd, which soon had heads mounted on poles for a parade into Santiago’s streets.
The next day, December 8, the Spanish executed twelve rebel passengers, and were preparing to execute more crew members when HMS Niobe, a British warship, entered Santiago Bay. Her captain, Sir Lambton Lorraine, heard what was happening and turned his guns on the city. Arguing that there were British citizens among Virginius’s survivors, he ordered the Spanish to stop all executions or face bombardment.
Meanwhile, the United States was reacting to confused but consistently horrific reports of the killings in Cuba. These were received by a nation already overexcited by weeks’ worth of catastrophic news; in the preceding month, the too-big-to-fail New York banking firm Jay Cooke & Company had declared bankruptcy, setting off an economic implosion that would come to be known as the Panic of 1873. Events in Cuba had plenty of frightened and frustrated Americans screaming for war.
At least as many remembered the nation’s recent civil war well enough to take pause. Others contemplated the country’s minuscule navy and nearly complete lack of an army. Awkwardly enough, when news of the Virginius atrocities reached the United States, New York City was being visited by a Spanish ironclad warship more powerful than any vessel in the U.S. fleet.
America’s ambassador to Spain, Republican desperado Daniel Sickles, was a stranger to caution. In 1859, while a New York representative to Congress, Sickles had murdered his wife’s lover, Philip Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Sickles was the first American ever acquitted on grounds of temporary insanity, a verdict on the congressman’s judgment that somehow didn’t prevent his becoming one of the Union’s “political generals” in the Civil War. His pugnacious incompetence—or insubordination—on the second day at Gettysburg nearly lost the battle, cost many men’s lives, and cost Sickles himself a leg.
Astonishingly, this excitable man had been appointed, at this sensitive time, America’s envoy to Spain. The incendiary tone of Sickles’s communiqués was matched only by the irresponsibility of Spanish foreign minister José de Carvajal, who liked to read his insulting replies aloud to cheering crowds in Madrid.
Spaniards were desperate for something to cheer about. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes had timed his Cuban revolt to take advantage of an interregnum caused by the deposition of Queen Isabella II. She was chased from the throne by a liberal military junta that sought to create a constitutional monarchy—but couldn’t find an acceptable monarch. From 1868 to 1873, while sending more than a hundred thousand soldiers to Cuba, Spain had endured coups, revolts, and the outbreak of civil war with the Carlists, a powerful movement determined to restore a traditionally Catholic, authoritarian monarchy. The Virginius crisis fell upon Spain’s first republican government, a chaotic experiment in self-rule less than ten months old. In this period of weak hopes and violent dissent, about the only things most Spaniards could agree on were keeping hold of Cuba and defying yanqui interference.
Despite all passions and incitments, the situation was defused by calm deliberation. The professionals, Fish and his Spanish counterpart, Admiral de Bernabé, succeeded in crafting the peace their presidents desired. A contemporary Thomas Nast cartoon for Harper’s Weekly shows General Joaquin Jovellar, the chief Spanish military official in Cuba, being forced at pistol-point by his boss, President Emilio Castellar, to return a toy Virginius to American authority, which is represented by a huge ship manned by Fish, Grant, and Secretary of the Navy George Robeson. On his way up the gangplank, Jovellar must stare into the muzzle of a cannon ironically emblazoned with Grant’s 1868 campaign motto “Let Us Have Peace.”
Like many an international crisis, the Virginius affair ended in the sort of anticlimax that called all the preceding “no choice but to act” rhetoric into embarrassingly reasonable doubt.
Spain released Virginius’s survivors—ninety-six insurrectos and crew, including thirteen Americans—though not without inflicting a final cruelty. The day before their liberation, the prisoners were told that they were to be executed the next morning; a priest was sent in to take confessions, and the prisoners spent their last night of captivity in mortal fear. The Spanish enjoyed their prank, but also made reparations to the families of the U.S. and British citizens they had killed.
The ship, looted, leaking, and filthy, was turned over to the U.S. Navy, which sailed her out of Santiago Harbor on December 16. Spain’s honor was restored by a ceremonial rudeness: As the fraudulently registered ship departed, Spanish ships and forts were allowed to forgo the courtesy of saluting her new American flag. Headed for New York, the rotten old freebooter got as far as Cape Fear before her seams yawned and she sank, the Stars and Stripes still dubiously flapping at her masthead.
The resolution of the Virginius crisis did nothing to bring peace to Cuba. The war that had begun with Céspedes’ 1868 Grito de Yara dragged on until 1878, entering history books as the Ten Years’ War. It was both a military and a social war, a war of constant, inconclusive guerrilla skirmishes and maniacal partisan violence on city streets. Spain trained and armed at least 230,000 regular soldiers and volunteer militiamen during the conflict, and lost more than 83,000 dead to wounds and disease. The mambi army may never have numbered more than 15,000 to 20,000 in any given year; Spanish officials boasted that their forces killed 13,600 Cubans in battle and put 43,500 prisoners to death. The Spanish tried to cut off the rebels from popular support by pioneering in the development of centers for reconcentración—concentration camps—where peasants herded in from the countryside starved to death by the thousands.
Though Spain was manifestly unable to quash the rebellion, and despite the successful invasion of the western provinces by rebel columns under generals Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, the war ended in stalemate. Too many Cubans felt too many ways about independence. There was dissension within the revolutionary government itself, which unseated Carlos Manuel de Céspedes in 1874 and refused even to provide him with a bodyguard; the “father of his country” was hunted down by a Spanish column and died—perhaps fighting, perhaps by his own hand—in 1874.
The mambises’ real weakness was Spain’s success in portraying the struggle for freedom as a “race war.” Too many white Cubans, especially in the west and in the capital, Havana, feared that the armed ex-slaves of Oriente would turn independence into a black-on-white bloodbath. They saw the white rebel leaders as deluded liberal aristocrats, and they were terrified by Maceo. This military genius from Santiago, a black man portrayed in the pro-rebel press as “the Bronze Titan,” was even distrusted by much of the revolutionary government, and racebased enmity between rebel factions eventually reduced the movement to armed impotence.
In 1878, most rebel leaders signed the Treaty of Zanjón, laying down their arms in return for Spanish promises of amnesty for all, freedom for black soldiers, better trade terms for Spain’s last great colony, and limited autonomy. Diehards such as Gómez and Maceo had no faith in Spain’s word, but they’d been defeated by their own people, by Cubans’ willingness to hate one another. After a brief attempt at reigniting the war—a revolt based in Oriente called la guerra chiquita (the Little War) of 1879–80—they went into exile believing that sooner or later Spanish misrule would make another war inevitable. Somehow Cubans would have to be taught to trust each other next time.
By choosing not to fight over Virginius, the United States and Spain avoided a war that neither was prepared for. When it finally came, twenty-five years later, America’s navy had been built up to world-power standards, while Spain’s had rusted into impotence. The Spanish Army had exhausted itself in losing battles against Cuba’s freedom fighters, while America could call on endless manpower. The first U.S. volunteer to die in the Santiago campaign of 1898 would be Rough Rider Sergeant Hamilton Fish, grandson of Grant’s peace-making secretary of state.
Virginius’s story reminded me that Americans have always approached Cuba under false colors. Over centuries of slave trading, rum smuggling, filibusters, revolutions, and embargoes, we have sometimes been trying to deceive our own government, sometimes Cuba’s, and sometimes both. Sometimes we’ve only been lying to our friends and neighbors: pretending, for example, that forays to the Western Hemisphere’s most famous sex-tourism destination were really just fishing trips, beach vacations, casino junkets. No doubt we have often lied to ourselves, traveled to Cuba with one respectable thought in mind when the true impulse was a desire unnamable even to the mirror: a missionary’s yearning for a lover of the same sex, a failed businessman’s need for a less level playing field, a great democracy’s irrepressible letch for empire.
And here we were, my companions and I, hoping to reach Santiago from Kingston, flying various questionable flags—Esau’s faith-based business, the choir’s accommodation with fundamentalist Christianity, my “missionary” journalism—yet expecting a fair deal from Cubans constrained by their own official hypocrisies.
The sky had gone dark while Esau made fruitless cell phone calls and Ileana scowled triumphantly. A discreet chat with a Jamaican airport official had assured me that the departing-charter head tax was real. I couldn’t see our next move. At last, I noticed Maricel arguing in Spanish with a Cubana employee: not a suit, but a baggage handler. Her voice was rising, and heads were turning. I stepped over and sympathized—neither of them knew how much luggage would really be allowed to fly—and eventually took Pedro the porter aside, leaving Maricel to her anguished sorting.
Short and skinny, Pedro seemed a put-upon nice guy, accustomed to hassle from both passengers and his higher-ups. He responded kindly when I asked if he knew what was really going on with our flight. “No se exactamente … I don’t know for sure,” he said, “but that one”—indicating Ileana with an almost imperceptible nod—“likes very much to make trouble for the missionaries. For Americans in general. They all do, but they like to screw missionaries best.”
Y como no? I thought as I thanked Pedro. Why not? The Cubans knew that nonprofits like Esau’s were hard to distinguish from undercapitalized tour companies, and saw no reason not to squeeze for every ostensibly charitable dollar. Maybe the flip-flop of dates and reservations had been unavoidable; maybe it was Esau’s screw-up, or maybe the Cubans were hassling us for hassle’s sake. Maybe this was someone’s entrepreneurial shakedown, or a Havana-ordered hindrance. What did it matter? The money we’d paid Esau to cover the head tax was going to spend the night in a Kingston hotel while we flew back to New York.
I remembered a conversation I’d had, that hopeful morning, with Jacob, the Jamaican redcap who’d pulled my share of our leaden charity the hundred yards from arrivals to departures on his creaking cart. Jacob was a powerfully wrinkled man with impressive thatches of ear hair who observed, on learning where I was headed, “Lot of Jamaican people going to Cuba these days.” He told me about the program known as the “Miracle Flights,” which brings Jamaicans threatened by blindness to Cuba for surgery.
“The Cubans treat dem,” he said, pausing to underscore his respect, “for free.”
Were the Miracle Flights acts of proletarian grace, or cynical propaganda ploys? Who cared? From Jacob’s point of view and mine, there could hardly be a downside to a child seeing again. And that evening, as I left Pedro and started walking purposefully toward Esau, I realized that I didn’t care who was incompetent, who had let us down, who might be ripping off whom. I was at least as guilty as anyone else of twisting the truth to suit my needs. I could not be mad at anyone, did not care what had to be done so long as by night’s end I could board a plane to Santiago.
For the first but by no means the last time on what would prove a wondrous, revelatory, and sometimes frightening journey, I felt peculiarly calm and certain, almost guided. I saw that somebody had to get the Reverend Onyegoro in gear. And sure enough, Esau snapped to when I proposed that the chorus raise the head tax right then and there, as a loan for him to repay. The chorus’s latina percussionist, Annie, volunteered to negotiate with Ileana. When I laid the facts before the chorus, several FemTones helped squelch protests against extortion and incompetence; instead, they organized a collection of thirtysomething dollars from each traveler, enough to cover the head tax and put us (along with some 40 percent of the donated medicine and clothing) on the plane that turned out to be still waiting on the tarmac.
“I’m not coming, William,” Esau said as he returned, beaming, from passing our money to Ileana. “The Cubans say they’ll help me explain to the hotel here why I should get our deposit back. I will fix it tomorrow morning and join you in Santiago by afternoon. In the meantime, I know you can handle everything.”
There wasn’t much time left for talking. Esau pressed upon me a wad of bills—had this always been held in reserve, or was it a slice off the top of the chorus’s collection, taken when he bargained the Cubans down?—and instructions for handling the next twenty-four hours’ transactions in Santiago: check-in at the Hotel Melia; the official Cubana fee for bus fare and the very unofficial “tip” for the drivers and guide; paying for the festival tickets. I had become a tour operator.
Even as I pressed Esau for the receipt—the IOU—that prudent chorus members had insisted on having, I was wondering what to do about a hunch that I wouldn’t be seeing him tomorrow. What then? What would I need to know? As he sat on a suitcase and wrote out the receipt, I asked who we were supposed to meet, what we were supposed to do come Monday to live up to our missionary obligations. I scribbled notes: pastors’ names and addresses, agreed-upon divisions of the chorus’s aid. As for all the rest of our advertised plans—the chapel painting and school construction, etc.—Esau assured me he’d be there in plenty of time to arrange all that. What about those OFAC extensions for Maricel, Walter, and me? On their way, no problem, don’t worry.
He stood, and I automatically stuck out my hand. Even as he thanked me and called God’s blessing on our mission, I couldn’t help noticing that Esau shook hands in the West African way, like laying a dead fish in someone else’s palm. It’s just a cultural difference, doesn’t mean a thing, but it felt like the opposite of conviction. Still, his smile seemed sincere.
The departure terminal was almost deserted. The old rasta was gone, and no chorus members were in sight. Pedro was standing by the gateway entrance, waving urgently. I picked up my bags and ran.
The plane that lifted us into the blackness over Morant Bay was an antique Soviet turboprop. Sailing over Virginius’s old course, the plane genuflected violently to every drop in air pressure. We cheered and sang anyway, until the tiredest among us began to fall asleep. Antonio Maceo Airport was less than an hour ahead, with so many hopes waiting after.
I was tidying up my belongings, prior to attempting a few minutes’ shut-eye, when I finally read the Reverend Esau’s receipt: “The chorus has paid Cubana Airlines one thousand one hundred thirty-three dollars for Jamaican charter tax. Esau Onyegoro.”
That, and the date. Nothing more. No obligation, nothing enforceable. But somehow I didn’t feel as if anything had been taken from us. Far from it: I felt as if I were holding our pennant in my hands, the appropriately irresponsible motto and banner of our infinitely precedented expedition. One way or another, we were at last on our way to Cuba. It was everything but a lie.