Chickie danced like a man with a mission. Everybody out on the floor in the Café des Artex’s atrium was having a good time, and there were some fine dancers among them. The band was Las Perlas del Son, seven santiagueras in opalescent dresses, four working the beat and three up front singing and shimmying.
Still, Chickie was the man to watch. In fact, it was hard to take my eyes off him. He was a little guy, maybe eye level with the pointy tips of the bust on his partner’s old-school cocktail dress. His slightly outsize head looked even bigger for being perfectly bald, giving him the overall head-to-body proportion of a comic book Evil Genius. His moves were strenuous but smooth, flinging his partner out and back like a funk centrifuge. She was laughing so hard, having so much fun she almost forgot to brake into his snappy passes and twirls, but Chickie was always right there to catch her, dancer enough for both of them. He’d do something daring, she’d shriek; he’d cock his head and leap in again, bouncing off the beat like it was a trampoline. Everybody else out there was dancing to dance, dancing to make love, but Chickie …
I came to hear Las Perlas. A couple of days back, walking down Enramadas toward the city archive, I passed an open archway with a little desk just inside. A young woman was reading at the desk, a beat-up bass leaning against the staircase behind her. El contrabajo belonged to the lady, Rosita Lopez, contrabajista and directora of Las Perlas del Son. (The name means both “Pearls of Sound” and “Pearls of Son,” the roots music of Oriente.) Her all-woman grupo had traveled to Australia and Canada, back before the millennium, but things were slower now. She worked at this government office, where a musician friend had just returned her bass.
All members of the violin family make sound the same way. A plucked note sends vibrations shivering down through the delicate wooden bridge that supports the strings. The bridge stands on the instrument’s pretty top, between the carved f holes; vibrations transmitted through the bridge move the top, or “table,” up and down. Inside the fiddle, a wooden dowel called the sound post is braced between the table and the broad back. The post transmits the table’s oscillations to the back; the whole sound box shivers, beating the plucked string’s vibratory frequency into the air, making sound waves throb and sigh.
Rosita’s bass made more of a thud. All that transmitting of vibrations requires wood touching wood, but along the meters of glued connections among table, sides, and back there was almost as much open seam as closed. The sound post was out of position, the bridge a whittled chunk of what looked like packing-crate slat. By Santiago son-playing standards, it was rough. By U.S. jazz musician standards, it was impossible. I found out where Las Perlas would be playing next, and I’d come to the Café des Artex with a parcel of strings, bridges, and spare parts donated by Kolstein music and Lemur music, the top U.S. bass shops, to the contrabajistas of Santiago.
I knew she’d find uses for all that, but just now she was demonstrating that las contrabajistas de Santiago de Cuba never let a little thing like impossibility stop the groove. Rosita was a small woman with small hands; she muscled those too-high strings down to the fingerboard as easily as if she were pressing piano keys. She faced the bass into the brick-and-stucco corner like a bad boy, making the walls act as an extension of the sound box, doubling her volume. Her tumbao boomed, driving Las Perlas and the packed dance floor.
Driving Chickie, who circled his partner like a strutting pigeon, limboing down to the ground and jumping up like the earth just shoved. He was magnificent, ridiculous. I felt like I was watching an award-winning train wreck. Chickie was so …
“‘Damaged.’ Or ‘wounded,’ that’s the right word, yes?”
Tomas’s English was a whole lot better than my German, though he pronounced “wounded” with a “wow.” But I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.
“Chickie was wounded?”
“In the war. The Angola War.” Tomas was Chickie’s friend and the lover of Chickie’s dance partner, Irina. He lived in Stuttgart and tried to spend at least a month of every year in Santiago. Tall and long-nosed, gray at the temples, he looked like a run-down Dürer knight with folds like dueling scars in his broad cheeks. He may be a decade older than I, or it may just be the rum.
“They blew him up.”
The Angola War. “Cuba’s Vietnam” is the cliché.
The overt war began when Fidel Castro sent troops to support the former Portuguese colony’s first independent government against rebels backed by the United States and South Africa’s apartheid regime. But Cuba’s Angolan venture predated its large-scale troop commitment.
In the mid-1960s and early ’70s, Cuban advisers helped the socialist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) make war on the Portuguese from exile in Zaire. When the MPLA formed the new nation’s first government in 1975, the United States gave financial and military support to another mildly socialist anticolonial army, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), fronted by Jonas Savimbi. Savimbi rebranded UNITA as the MPLA’s “anti-Communist” opposition and cooperated with a U.S.-backed South African invasion of Angola. Castro responded by sending more than thirty thousand troops to check the South Africans.
Angola’s civil conflict became one of the Cold War’s most protracted and complex proxy battles. Between 1975 and 1988, some 350,000 Cuban soldiers served in Africa, as did fifty thousand Cuban doctors, teachers, and other nation-building volunteers. Well armed by the Soviet Union, Cuba’s army beat back the initial South African / UNITA offensive and supported the MPLA government in a long counterinsurgency. The proxy war ended in a dramatic 1988 showdown when Cuban troops met and stalemated a full-scale South African invasion. The climactic, months-long Battle of Cuito-Cuanavale was the greatest battle on the continent since World War II, involving artillery, armored vehicles, and jet fighters. Cuba’s narrow and costly victory forced all sides to peace talks that eventually resulted in the complete withdrawal of Cuban and South African troops.
Though U.S. conservatives—conspicuously including anti-Castro Cubans—still supported Savimbi, UNITA degenerated into a warlord faction notable for its use of “blood diamonds,” child soldiers and kidnapped sex slaves; it collapsed with his death in 2002.
And though Nelson Mandela personally thanked Fidel Castro and the Cuban people for their intervention in Angola, which helped topple South Africa’s apartheid government, Cuba’s African adventure wasn’t a triumph for ideological purists. Between 1975 and 1988, there were always thirty thousand to fifty thousand Cuban soldiers in Angola; over time, many Angolans came to resent “Cuban colonialism” as a reprise of Portuguese rule. Cuba made numerous arrogant, shortsighted interventions in Angola’s economic and social life, including a notorious policy of replacing all native sugarcane with a supposedly superior Cuban variety—which promptly died off, taking Angola’s sugarcane industry with it. The Angola War was always complicated by wars in neighboring countries, particularly Congo and Namibia, and by ethnic conflicts that transcended borders. As in all wars that erase distinctions between combatants and civilians, all sides were guilty of brutally simple solutions to complex problems, such as the “free fire” zones established by Cuban arms, which cleared civilians from contested border areas.
And Cuba was not spared the ugly ironies common to prolonged client-state wars. When the MPLA government began to run short of cash, Cuban soldiers were used to protect Chevron oil rigs from attack by UNITA saboteurs. The oil revenue was used to pay the Cuban government a per-soldier fee in support of the expeditionary force. Though profitable for Cuba, this arrangement made Angola—and therefore Cuba—all the more dependent on capitalist, neocolonial powers.
Cuba’s experience in Angola differs from the United States’ Vietnam debacle in many ways, not least among them Cuba’s reasonable claim to victory. Then there’s the difference between Lyndon Baines Johnson’s motivation for escalating the Vietnam War and Castro’s for going into Angola. Johnson’s impetus was not ardent anticommunism, but fear of the political cost of “losing” Vietnam. While Soviet aid was plentiful and his people firmly under control, Fidel could hardly have feared political repercussions from the “fall” of Angola. His enthusiasm for the war was always greater than that of his Soviet sponsors, who often tried to rein him in. Castro was clearly excited by the anticolonial and antiapartheid aspects of the struggle, and seems to have committed Cuba to those causes, but the years of Angola’s oil-derived payments to Cuba muddle the mission. Was Cuba’s ultimate purpose in Angola revolutionary or self-serving?
Like the Vietnam War, Cuba’s war in Angola was intended to be much less than a maximum effort. Only a tiny percentage of the population would serve. Leaders in Cuba and the United States hoped that the home front would hardly notice that the nation was at war. But both conflicts dragged on for years, involving too many citizens. Even optional, overseas wars can’t be quarantined; one way or another, they change the nations that fight them.
Draft regulations and the advantages of social class protected many Americans from direct involvement in Vietnam. Still, by 1973, when most U.S. troops left Vietnam, almost three million servicemen and servicewomen had done time in Southeast Asia—about one in seventy Americans. More than fifty thousand had died there, nearly one in four thousand citizens. The terrible social impact of the war has been blamed on the news media, on White House lies, on a self-indulgent baby boom generation … but it’s undeniably true that an experience shared by so many Americans could not fail to change the nation. The war’s ideology, heroes, scandals, iconic imagery, slang, and drug culture radically revised America’s self-image.
Percentagewise, the Angola War was even more certain to disturb its home front. Those 350,000 soldiers and fifty thousand civilian volunteers represented 4.5 percent of a population of fewer than nine million Cubans—about one in every twenty-two cubanos. Nearly one in thirty-nine hundred died. If Vietnam was a dramatic social crisis for the United States, Angola was Cuba’s quiet catastrophe.
Comparatively quiet. Just as many Americans believed that the U.S.A. had a duty to fight communism anywhere in the world, so many Cubans felt their country had a moral mission to fight imperialism and oppression. Helping Angolans stand up to apartheid South Africa and Uncle Sam wasn’t a hard sell. And though some cubanos undoubtedly disagreed with the war, especially as it dragged on, the regime had no tolerance for antiwar protests.
Yet the war came home in many forms. The prolonged occupation of another country inevitably seeds cynicism and corruption. Though victorious in key battles, Cuba’s soldiers spent most of their thirteen years in Angola fighting a counterinsurgency, a role that alternated between stultifying guard duty—perhaps at a Chevron oil rig—and search-and-destroy or area-denial operations such as burning every village along the border with Namibia. It’s not surprising that many cubanos perceive a disaffection in sons and daughters, friends and neighbors who served in Angola. Some suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder; some will just never again see the world as others do.
Angola vets brought the war home in their hearts, minds, and, inevitably, in their bodies. Not just in scars and disabilities, but also in their blood. The return of Angola veterans started a pan-Caribbean epidemic of dengue fever. The vets also brought back Cuba’s first recorded HIV infections.
Both the U.S. war in Vietnam and Cuba’s intervention in Angola cost far more than their societies could afford. The underfunded, voraciously expensive Vietnam War raised deficits and inflation, setting the United States up for the ruinous cost shock of early ’70s oil crises. And though the Soviet Union spent billions on aid to Angola’s war effort, and Angola paid for Cuba’s protection, the years from 1973 to 1988 were the years Cuba most needed to be investing in a self-sustaining economy. The collapse of the Soviet Union over the next three years triggered a 34 percent drop in Cuba’s gross domestic product.
The United States and Cuba had some altruistic motives for their crusades in Vietnam and Angola, but imperial behavior engenders imperial attitudes. Imperialism often prevents nations from focusing on domestic problems, from social inequality to economic weakness. While the United States was attempting to win an unwinnable war in Vietnam, it was failing to remedy its increasing dependence on foreign oil. While Cuba was rescuing Angola, it was failing to remedy its abject dependence on foreign aid. These failings have been the central facts of each nation’s political dysfunction, security woes, and economic instability ever since.
Like Vietnam vets, then, veterans of the Angola War came home to a lot less than they had a right to expect. They’d been told they were fighting for their economic and political systems, for their way of life and its ideals. But war’s end was followed by severe cutbacks and shortages, by unemployment and crowding, inflation, and a terrible, pervasive disillusionment.
* * *
“They blew him up,” Tomas told me.
His friend Chickie was smashed up over there, in Angola. Tomas couldn’t really tell me the story, because Chickie had never told it to him. Chickie can’t talk. Whatever happened left him mute.
“I’ve never asked him to write it down,” Tomas said.
Chickie must do a fair amount of writing. Not so many people can interpret sign language, though Tomas, who obviously loves his friend, has learned some. Chickie, however, taught hearing-and speech-impaired students, and presumably spent a lot of time in front of blackboards and typewriters or computers. But the story of what happened to him in Angola is one he’d never cared to share.
Las Perlas took a break. Chickie and Irina came to the table, and Tomas handled introductions all around.
Irina was delightful, full of happy energy, obviously in love with Tomas. She was a woman in her late thirties, tall and somewhat gawky, a bit horse-faced. Her smile was joyous and bright white, except for her right front tooth, which was the same rum brown as her hair.
Chickie was, as expected, intense, shaking hands like an arm wrestler checking out the opposition. He stared into my eyes for a second, then ended our wordless conversation with an adamant nod.
Tomas bought a round, and I bought the next. There was a shortage of chairs, so Irina sat on Tomas’s lap. Chickie drank as he danced, fearlessly, unrelentingly. God knew how much he’d already knocked down, but I thought his eyes glazed just a bit with our second round. Then Las Perlas started up again, and Chickie and Irina left us for the floor.
I learned a little more about Tomas, his accountancy practice back home, how he came to Santiago as a much younger man, fell in love with the city, kept coming back, fell in love with the people and then, years ago, with Irina.
He said he’d be happy to marry Irina, not because their love needed marriage—“We’re not a couple of kids, yes?”—but to get her out of the country, where he could take care of her. They weren’t really free to carry on their romance here; there was no privacy in the home she shared with an extensive family, and she couldn’t join him in hotels or straitlaced casas particulares. The iffy casas, the ones that accommodate prostitutes? Well, they’d take true lovers, but sneaking around that way was illegal, expensive, and tense.
Private homes offer no refuge. Once, Tomas tried taking Irina to a house in a much smaller town, where he and the landlord made the mistake of thinking it would be okay to leave the car not quite hidden in the house’s side alley. Twenty minutes into their lovemaking, the cops were at the door, wondering what the car with the brown tourist-rental plates was doing there. They lied fast, and piled on still more lies in front of senior officers at the police station the next day, trying to explain that no money changed hands, that this was just a case of friends letting friends stay over.
Nor is it easy to marry your way off the island. The Cuban government hassles its citizens about leaving, and other nations are so wary of marriages of convenience that they often give true love a viciously hard time. Tomas had tried the shortcut method, inviting Irina to visit him in Germany—where they’d marry, so she could stay—but German officials in Cuba worked so hard to discourage her that she gave up on the visa. “There’s no reason, no law against it. Theoretically they have to let you visit, but practically …”
They could marry in Cuba, but that’s no guarantee of permission to leave the country. Even if successful, the exit process can easily take two years or more.
Tomas told me the story of a guy he knew who’d married a Cuban girl, two years and counting. When the government considered her application to leave, it was rejected because of their age difference. “He is, yes, more than twenty years older, but their love is close!” But the Cubans disapproved of what they saw as a marriage of convenience.
“And it’s crazy,” he said, “because everybody with skills wants to leave here. The doctors, they give their five years’ service, then they start applying to leave. And nothing gets done here, because all the best people have left to get work.”
Then, shouting over the music, he told a marvelous story of a Spanish woman who married a Cuban taxi driver. The taxista was yet another frustrated Cuban professional, with a degree in psychology. The lady from Spain adored his deep intellect; their love began as a passionate meeting of bodies and minds. They married, but when it came time to leave, the bureaucratic paper trail revealed that before marrying the Spaniard, the cubano had already been married twice—and divorced only once.
“Well,” Tomas explained, “here you can get married to one on Monday and get around to divorcing the other on Wednesday.” The bigamy issue was resolved, but the newly divorced cubana wife was the mother of the man’s only child, a daughter. The taxi man persuaded his forgiving Spanish bride that they should take his daughter with them to Spain. This required the mother’s consent, so a deal was worked out, with the Spanish bride sponsoring a visit by the mother—who reclaimed her husband and daughter the moment she arrived in Spain. In no time at all, the Cubans were remarried and living as a family in Madrid, leaving the sweet Spaniard all alone and much the wiser.
Tomas wanted to find a way to bring Irina to Germany. Until he could figure out how to do that, he’d visit as often as he could and stay as long as possible. He called often, and they talked for hours. (He called Chickie, too, doing all the talking, knowing by the fact that his impetuous friend stays on the line that his calls were welcome.) And if he couldn’t get Irina out of here, no matter what, he said, he’d find a way to get her teeth fixed. “She gets the basic care, but there’s no money for the pure look of things. And she is so beautiful. Isn’t she beautiful? She deserves, I think she deserves to have her smile.”
The last set was over. I said my good-byes to Tomas, Irina, and Chickie, and to Las Perlas del Son. I give Rosita the bass bits, for her use and to share among los contrabajistos de Santiago de Cuba. She introduced me to the rest of the band: percussionist Maria Salas, singers Oleisis Infante Guerra, Albis Garrido, and Ailen Guevara, guitarist Maritza Cutiño, and la trecera, Yilian Zalazar. It was my last night, and though it was late, I couldn’t help lingering as Tomas and his friends departed and the players packed. Out in the street, I took pictures of Las Perlas in their spangled dresses, carrying the great half-broken bass by its head and tailpiece like stretcher bearers bringing the wounded to safety.
Next morning, I started out for Vermont by way of the Moncada Barracks.
While the air was still cool, I walked my book-stuffed roller bag and my crammed computer backpack from the heart of the old city to Lilia’s house. She wouldn’t hear of my hiring a taxi to the airport, so she’d asked a friend to drive me; I’d accepted, mostly for the chance to see her one more time.
The Lucero family, heroes and children of heroes, were there to wish me well, and I was grateful for and much humbled by their kindness. Lilia fed me tostones again, and one more tiny cup of her sweet coffee. We prayed together.
I made presents of the last school supplies and toiletries in my stash, good razors and scents and soaps. These tokens were nothing compared to their gift, a tableau chiseled from a huge coconut: three wild spotted doves in the crown of a palm. I tied it onto my pack but it weighed next to nothing, a burden of kindness that lightened my heart and our parting.
I flew from Santiago to Havana, then had to figure out how to get from José Martí International Airport’s domestic terminal to the international terminal, kilometers away. Taxi drivers wanted outrageous sums to make the connection, so I decided to wait for the advertised interterminal bus.
Everyone warned me that tourists don’t use the shuttle, and when the six o’clock shuttle hadn’t shown by six thirty, I began to understand why. The few folks waiting with me were airport day-shift workers, now heading home, and a security detail from the army facility next door—I didn’t look closely—heading back to barracks. They all looked at me as if I were a little nuts or, worse, disgracefully cheap. But I was tired of propaganda and harassment and fee-wracking, and I wanted this bit of Cuban infrastructure to function. Besides, if the flight were delayed, I might need my last three pesos convertibles for food.
The sky rushed toward dusk. No bus. Birds set up a sleepy-time call-and-response. Trees blazed up red and yellow in the sideways light. The airport road was lined with royal palms, potent and ceremental. I began to think of last things, as in, “These’ll be the last palms I’ll see for a while.” One last pathetic Cuban dog dragged by, so small and saggy it looked almost marsupial in the uncertain light.
At last, at about six forty-five, the bus stand attracted a crowd of workers in the know, regulars who said the drivers never run the six-o’clock shuttle; that’s when they break for dinner.
When the seven-o’clock shuttle showed, it was the fabled Havana guagua I’d been told to avoid. It was long and vast and nowhere near big enough for all of us. We crowded on anyway, and it was tight enough to make a traveler think about his wallet’s location and the vulnerability of his backpack’s pockets, but no more crowded than the rush-hour trolleys of my Boston youth. It was just that there was less money in every pocket on board, more travail on almost every face, less soap and more stink to nearly everybody, including me.
It was dark by then. The driver was in a bad mood. The guagua threatened minivans and pedicabs and came awfully close to two motos flying without headlights. We passed a terminal dedicated to flights to the United States. It looked lonely.
Terminal three, for most other international flights, is modern, bright, and relaxed. I’d somehow arrived with time to spare: time to confirm that my flight to Jamaica would leave on schedule, time to pay my exit tax, to call Yolanda and thank her and the Havana Luceros once more, time to smoke a last Montecristo and to shop for CDs. Roberta, the music booth’s clerk, shared my delight in finding a copy of Celina Gonzalez’s ¡Qué Viva Chango! And no wonder: Roberta wore a necklace of red-and-white beads. She put Celina on her boom box and we danced in the booth; Roberta pantomimed shaking and dusting and anointing, the rituals of cleansing and blessing. And then it was time to go.
* * *
At the final inspection of passport and bags, I had to take off my belt, shoes, even my watch. Hurrying to put them back on, I dropped the watch. The crystal popped off and the second hand stopped. I assumed it was broken, but I pressed the stem and it started ticking again. Everything felt like an omen.
Whatever that one meant, it ushered me onto an almost-empty plane that touched down in Kingston close to midnight.
Planning this trip, months earlier, I’d noticed the awkward gap between my arrival and my early-morning flight: not enough time to justify the bother and expense of taxiing into town for a bed. New York’s Air Jamaica phone reps assured me that, of course, I could wait in the terminal. No problem.
Problem. Busy as Norman Manley International Airport seemed on that long-ago weekend morning of the chorus’s arrival, it was not busy enough to stay open all night. My flight arrived as a final chore for a sleepy, resentful skeleton crew. Everyone wanted us to go away so they could go home. My fellow passengers rushed through the customs shed and grabbed taxis while I was still asking Air Jamaica reps where I could sit, as promised, through the terminal’s graveyard shift. They avoided me. Cornered, they said that I couldn’t stay, that the entire airport closes until dawn. They took no responsibility for their colleague’s disinformation. Yes, all the taxis were gone, and no, they wouldn’t help me summon a cab or find a hotel room. They wouldn’t even tell me their names, and the one wearing an ID badge took it off when I got out my notebook. Lights were switching off all around us. No, I could not stay there in the customs shed, with the night watchman. They would call security if I didn’t leave right now.
So, at about one A.M., I stood in the dark on the pickup/drop-off apron. The blackout wasn’t perfect. There was a light on in the customs shed at my back, perhaps for the night watchman to read by. I was clearly visible to the many young men lingering just beyond this glow. What were they doing there, miles from town, hours after Norman Manley called it a day? I looked for faces offering help or hope, but everyone stood just far enough from the light to stay anonymous. I could see eyes, but they avoided mine, snapping straight to my luggage. The light around me—or, rather, the distance it maintained—felt like a polite lie, a pretense we’d be honoring for just another minute or two until someone made up his mind.
I made mine up first. Counting on a few seconds’ grace, I strode right into the darkness, quick-walking down the apron to the only lighted door in sight.
Corporal Lawrence and Constables Cole and Elliott have my undying gratitude for their willingness to unlock the door of the Jamaican Constabulary Force’s airport substation. They made me comfortable on a bench with my bags stacked by my head, the Luceros’ three doves serene atop the pile. Air Jamaica abandons people “all the time,” they said, making me feel just a little less stupid. And the airport after midnight, they assured me, “is no place to be.”
Come the morning, however, I was in just the right place in the boarding-pass line to meet Jason, a Jamaican-born, New Jersey-raised U.S. Army soldier. He was tall and handsome, smart and endowed with that humble forthrightness many good kids learn from their encounters with the double-edged karma of soldiering. Having just finished a tour of duty in Iraq, Jason had been visiting relatives in Kingston. Now he was on his way to see his parents. We’d be sitting together.
I was tempted to ask if he’d been to the region of Iraq where my stepson Brendan was guarding an air base. But there was all the settling in to accomplish, and the air crew’s safety lecture to attend, and the takeoff to breathe through …
Once we were in the air, I realized I was no longer living Cuban-style: no longer scheming to make a little do a lot, worrying about pickpockets or wrong-day tickets or buses that don’t show. I was on my way home to the land where most things work, and I could finally relax … if it weren’t for worrying about the OFAC license extension that never arrived.
In a few hours I’d walk up to a JFK passport control booth and confess that I’d been trading with the enemy.
Unless I chose to lie.
So it had come down to that again. Lying my way into Cuba, lying my way back out: flying in as a missionary, flying home as—what?—a traitor? Only traitors trade with the enemy. When my country’s policy proceeds from the lie that Cuba is a threat to us, and not the other way around, nothing that follows can be entirely honest, straight, and true. Should I say that I’ve spent three weeks on a beach in Jamaica? Maybe I could claim to have received an extension but lost the fax. Or should I just tell the truth and shame the devil?
I went around and around for a while, but there were only so many possibilities. Coming in under the Reverend Esau’s missionary wing was awkward enough; I doubted I could pull off a serious, solo lie. So I’d confess, which meant I’d be busted or fined. It looked the same no matter how many times I turned it over, so I was grateful for the distraction when the crew served snacks and drinks, and Jason and I resumed our interrupted conversation.
He had five years in. His specialty, he said, was communications, but they needed heavy weapons, his cross-specialization, so he’d just finished a tour as a machine gunner on supply convoys. In those latter months of 2005, convoys were getting hit every day.
When I couldn’t resist asking about the war, I tried to make my curiosity a gambit he could refuse. “I suppose everybody asks how you think the war is going.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s just war. Just war. You go there, you fight, you come back and try to forget about it.”
“Just war,” I echoed.
“Yeah.” For a while, he stayed on-message. Things were getting better over there, we were winning, we were accomplishing our mission. Morale was good. Everybody was proud of what they were doing.
Then Jason told me that the Iraqi people are beautiful. I replied that people everywhere are beautiful. We agreed that a lack of necessities makes some people act ugly and that there’s a great lack of necessities out there. Not so much where we were headed, but where we’d been.
They brought us lunch, and Jason kept talking. He told me his friends at home didn’t always recognize the guy he’d become. “I’m a lot more cautious now.” He paused, looking at nothing for a moment. “I’m a lot more cautious.”
“Well,” I offered, “kids think they’re immortal. Kids don’t believe in consequences. I imagine you’ve seen enough to know you’re not immortal.”
“That’s it,” he said. “Lots of young people, ours and theirs …”
He was reenlisting. “I think I’ve got one more deployment in me.” He’d probably be heading to Afghanistan, but who could tell? “They keep your life on hold, just so you know.”
Just so you know who’s in charge. Not so much a policy as a signal, like el bloqueo, the embargo.
Jason’s father is a Vietnam vet. From what his father had told him, Jason thought the Army had been doing a better job taking care of veterans than in his dad’s time, but it was hard to say.
I asked whether his fellow soldiers feel appreciated by civilian America, and he said they do, but without offering any examples. I asked whether they knew what they were fighting for.
“I mean, not many of my friends really ask. Nobody really knows why we’re there … I’ve been there,” he said, “and I don’t know.”
I thought of the letters and battle reports of Vara del Rey and his comrades of Spain’s army in Cuba, who wrote, “We have no hope of victory, because we don’t know what victory means.”
When Jason said he didn’t know why he’d been where he’d been, why his comrades have killed and been killed, there was no self-pity in his face. He wasn’t asking for absolution, or to be excused the duty he’d sworn to give.
He was just telling the truth.
I told him I was sorry, and I told him I was honored by his service.
Then we changed the subject.
When the plane landed, we let a lot of older folks get off ahead of us, then walked side by side down the long white corridors to passport control. We wished each other luck, and I told him I hope to vote for him for president someday. He laughed—and then admitted he’d thought about running for something, sometime.
We turned right into an enormous hall, absolutely empty except for a score of manned passport booths. Jason shook my hand and headed for a booth. My chosen officer scowled as she saw me coming, but why bother picking another? With no more customers coming, any officer would have all the time in the world to discover my violation of OFAC regulations, my ersatz evangelical mission, my economic treachery.
Then, just a few steps before I reached her, I heard the roaring.
It came from the doors behind her, the doors on the far side of all these control booths. Roaring, cheering, laughing: there was some kind of happy mob out there.
As I handed over my passport, I realized how pressured she felt. “What’s going on?”
“Families,” she said, rolling her eyes. “There’s two planes right behind you.”
While she scanned my passport, a new howling sounded from the corridors I’d just quit. Some new mob, coming this way.
“Two full charters of new sponsees, one from Mexico, one from India, same time, adjacent gates … Jesus! And everybody’s waiting for them out there.” She jerked her head at the noise behind her. “Where’ve you been?”
“Cuba,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Get out of here.”
The screaming started as soon as I pushed against the door but stopped as soon as the couple of hundred people on the other side could see me. Then they went back to shouting and laughing and top-volume talking in ecstatic Bengali and Spanish. When I saw Kathy in the crowd, her mouth was open, but I couldn’t find her voice in all that clamorous love. I couldn’t even hear myself shouting her name, so it was as if there were no noise at all, no crowd, as if we were alone and she was all I could see.
We weren’t alone in the big shared taxi that carried us out to the suburbs, where we’ll find family and our car and the beginning of the ride home to Vermont, so we started telling stories. The kids, work, the house. Santiago, Havana, Guantánamo. Actually, I wasn’t ready to tell all those stories yet, so I talked more about the last couple of days, about saying good-bye to Lilia, and my Jamaican Constabulary sleepover. I tried to describe Jason, how much he was like Brendan, how much they reminded me of colonial soldiers a hundred years lost and gone.
And suddenly I remembered David, one more young man caught up in those old, old lies. I told Kathy about his swim, his imprisonment, his life now, his sorrow. I told her about the interview’s last question. He was done, exhausted, but when I’d asked for one more answer, he’d sighed and nodded.
“The fact that el Báse was there, this American place you could escape to, does that seem to you now like a wonderful thing, or a bad thing that had a good side?”
David had just told me about the most frightening and humiliating experiences of his life. Now he drew himself up to answer me, not striking a pose but just standing tall in the little room haunted by loss; a man standing over a dead child’s bed, softly stating what he knows, what he has earned the right to say is true.
“To me, el Báse is a piece of territory stolen many years ago. Morally, it doesn’t belong to them. The Americans keep it as a way to violate our country’s rights, to violate human rights. If you ask me whether or not I think you should be there, I would say, ‘Go.’”
After that interview, I remember, I felt homesick, ready to go. But I had another week’s work to do, had yet to get myself to Gitmo. I picked up the books scattered across the worn sheets; the cover of my junk-shop copy of José Vargas Vila’s Ante Los Barbaros—an image of an arrogant U.S. sailor, rifle on shoulder, looming over a helpless city—almost came off in my hand.
Go.
I still had work to do, but in my heart I already knew what I’d come to find.
Yanquis. If we norteamericanos left Guantánamo, if we had the courage to give it back now, despite our fear of looking weak, despite our terror of terrorism, where could we go?
Home. We could return to ourselves, to the America we were trying to be before 1898.
Since then, like a broken mirror, Cuba has preserved a thousand fractured images of her conqueror. Each likeness of us wielding money and guns to control what isn’t ours prefigures trouble we’ve brought on ourselves. Every reflection of us as we like to see ourselves—of hometown baseball, Lieutenant Hobson’s heroism, the Declaration of Independence as revered by Garcia, Martí, and Fidel—is a vision of the peace we could have known if we’d stuck to our founding principles, if we’d never denied another people the rights we cherish, if we had the courage to let others be free.
I was homesick in Havana, but it was homesickness that had taken me there. I’d gone looking for the America we’ve lost since 9/11, only to realize we’ve been lost much longer than that. Even David, who got lost trying to swim to Guantánamo, knew enough to tell me where we should go.
Home.
Yankee, come home.