CHAPTER 20

The colossal Hotel Nacional sat on a rocky hill, within eyeshot of the sea. Nearly a year ago, on a Sunday afternoon, Serguey had accompanied Gimenez to a café inside the hotel, a rendezvous with a mid-level Italian diplomat. He recalled the diplomat speaking so fast even some of the Spanish-sounding words got lost in translation. The man breathed heavily every few sentences. His belt and tie looked as if they were choking his sagging belly and wattle of a neck. Serguey recalled, quite fondly, not having to pay for a pastrami and cheese sandwich and a Cuban Corona beer. He laughed at a lot of bad jokes during a dessert from which he did not partake, out of respect. He recalled Gimenez being proposed an all-expenses paid business trip to Rome in exchange for a free stay at a Varadero beach resort for the diplomat’s family on his following visit.

The hotel’s history was fascinating. Fidel had dismantled its popular casino in 1960, and later he and Che Guevara had settled their headquarters there during the missile crisis. Prior to that, celebrities such as Frank Sinatra, Rocky Marciano, Buster Keaton, and Ernest Hemingway were among its most famous guests. Singer Nat King Cole, who’d been commissioned to perform a concert at Tropicana, wasn’t allowed to stay at the hotel because of the color of his skin. A bust and jukebox had been built on site, in his honor, as a symbol of Cuba’s racial tolerance post-Revolution. Serguey reckoned that in the post-Soviet world, Nat King Cole would’ve been permitted to pick the most extravagant room not because racial prejudice had been eradicated but because he would’ve brought something the Cuban government coveted more than integrity or equality: American dollars.

The bus Victor had taken arrived on schedule. He had brought with him an extra cell phone and a new calling card for Serguey. As they walked down Twenty-Third Avenue toward the seaside promenade, Serguey spoke to him briefly about the importance of remaining watchful. They couldn’t be responsible for getting Claudia arrested. They scrutinized their surroundings—slow-moving cars, people loitering on the steps of some building for no apparent reason, pedestrians on the opposite sidewalk heading in the same direction they were. A sidelong glance, a pause to tie a shoe, these things had taken on a more portentous meaning. The mustached man on the bench with a row of brown-tipped avocados at his feet, he was no longer a private seller. On another day, he simply might’ve been trying to take advantage of an avocado shortage in the city. But today the odds that he was an informant had increased. It would explain his extortionate prices and mediocre produce.

Claudia was sitting on the promenade wall, listening to music from what had to be an MP3 player. The wind ruffled her hair, pressing it over her right ear toward her face. She’d propped the backpack against her hip, secured by her elbow. Even in her nonchalant presentation, she seemed vigilant. She’d already seen the brothers moving toward her, yet she hadn’t reacted. She swayed her head slowly as if to the music. Serguey took it as a sign that it was safe to approach her. She removed one earphone while he and Victor sat next to her. Serguey gazed over Claudia’s shoulder across the water. El Faro del Morro, which a few nights before had been so close and majestically illuminated, rose like a small white syringe in the distance.

“Nice place you’ve picked,” Victor said. “Whenever I wanted to hook up with a tourist, I’d come here.”

Claudia avoided eye contact. “I use the internet in the hotel to post things online.”

“They let you?” Serguey asked.

“As long as I pay and don’t bother anyone.”

“How much do they charge?”

“It doesn’t take me long. I come prepared. Everything written and saved on a flash drive.”

Serguey took her sincerity and openness as a vote of confidence, though he was still curious about Claudia’s source of income. Browsing the internet was not only rigorously restricted and supervised, but it was also costly, some might say unaffordable. A clever way for the regime to claim accessibility when, in truth, the vast majority of Cubans got their information by word-of-mouth, the government-run nightly news, and the cesspool communist propaganda that were the national newspapers. Serguey recalled a recent debate on the Round Table television show, in which the five men in the panel had spent the whole hour discussing the economic situation in Cyprus. That’s what was considered a germane topic: the financial and commercial unraveling of a small Mediterranean nation most Cubans hadn’t heard about.

“It’s gotta be hard, what you do,” he said to Claudia, coalescing deference and a cautious brand of curiosity. “An activist with little access to the outside world.”

“I’m a journalist,” she replied. “And like I said, I have my ways. You’d be surprised how much information you can circulate with a CD or flash drive.” Claudia’s eyes followed a police car as it drove east, away from the hotel. “But yes,” she continued, “it’s hard. Cuba’s the country in the Western Hemisphere with the least internet access. I’m guessing at the Ministry you could sneak in here and there.”

Serguey chuckled. “I was too low in the food chain for that. Most of the computers I could get to were programmed to only access national databases.”

Claudia gave no response. She seemed to still be leering at the cop car.

Based on her demeanor, he thought it best to end the small talk. “So, did you get the video?”

She removed the earphones completely and shoved them into her backpack. “I did. Really brazen stuff.”

“That was all Serguey,” Victor said.

“It’s been shown on TV stations in Miami and Madrid,” Claudia said. “It’s also been shared on several websites. The headlines spread like wildfire.” She mimed a flashing news screen: “Respected Cuban Theater Director Imprisoned by Cuban Government; Political Persecution of the Arts. I think that not knowing exactly why your father was detained actually worked in our favor. People are speculating. The story’s taking on a life of its own.”

“Good.” Serguey envisioned himself being shown on television and computer screens, and he sensed a certain disquieting lightness—as if he hadn’t been that person, as if the Serguey who recorded the video was a separate entity that had subsequently found a way out of his skin.

A shiny, vintage yellow Pontiac convertible skirted the hotel and curved in the same direction as the police cruiser. The stylishly gleaming vehicle sped down El Malecon, anachronous to its stony, granular, ramshackle backdrop. A tourist family of three—wearing sunglasses and dangling arms out the door—was being driven by a paunchy, brown-skinned man. Mother and daughter were sitting in the back, holding on to their floppy hats with their free hand. Miniature Cuban and Canadian flags, like cut-up streamers, flailed just above the rearview mirrors. This early in the morning, they were probably on their way to Santa Maria or Varadero Beach.

Claudia followed the Pontiac until it blended into distant traffic. “People outside the island aren’t blind to what’s happening here. They see what we write and share, often in real time.”

Serguey looked back at the hotel. “Too bad it isn’t the same here.”

“Have you heard of Twitter?”

He had, but he wasn’t sure what it was exactly or how it worked.

She made a small screen out of her left hand, pointing at it with the other. “You can post these short messages for the people who follow you. Supposedly, you need the internet, but you can send a message from your phone with your password, and the message posts to your account. You can do it through phone calls too. They cost a dollar, and you can’t read the responses to your post, but you can let people know what’s happening right away.”

Serguey was impressed, though he appreciated Claudia’s explanation solely in theory. Impulsively, he said, “I don’t think we can hope for real change until Cubans here can see and interact with all of that information.” This was as sweeping and specific a statement, sans the video, as he’d ever made about his own country. He felt secure enough in his words to stare at Claudia and absorb a pinch of emancipation from her agreement.

“That’s the next challenge,” she said. “Here, the government can stay mum if they want. They can scare people into believing that their best friend is a traitor, or a theater director a dissident.”

Serguey nodded, narrowing his eyes. “I do wish more people would stand up for my dad.”

“Some of your father’s colleagues published a letter,” she said spiritedly. “I was going to print it for you, but I didn’t get a chance.”

“Really?” Serguey felt a flutter of delight. He hadn’t expected this. “A couple of them came by my place after my dad got arrested. I wasn’t sure if I could trust them.” It was uplifting to have his suspicions disproved. Perhaps there was more humanity and mettle in his father’s circle than there’d been in Parra and his peers at the National Council for the Performing Arts.

“Well, all I can say is not everyone’s willing to expose their skin like that.”

Serguey realized that Claudia was very skilled at layering her information, stacking it like building blocks.

“The letter has been released on a few independent news sites abroad,” she said. “They’re not talking about it here for obvious reasons, but it’s out there.”

“Have you gotten any responses to the video?” Victor asked.

Claudia planted her palms on the seawall’s jagged concrete. “I’ve gotten some interview requests. I can put you in touch with people, if you want.”

“If you think it’ll make a difference,” Serguey said.

She canted forward and smiled at him. “Actually, what I’m trying to say is that you can afford to see how what we’ve done plays out. Your father’s connections will count for something. If you do the interviews, State Security might go after you too.”

“They already did.”

Claudia’s eyes widened.

Victor said, “We got detained and beat up pretty good.”

With a slight torsion of her lips, she stammered into a whisper: “What did they say?”

“That our dad was involved with an international organization.” There was brash skepticism in the tone of Victor’s response. He seemed to be questioning why she didn’t have this information herself.

She was unruffled by his challenge. “Liberty Now.”

Serguey blurted out, surprised, “How did you know?”

She took a deep breath, as if gathering strength to reply. This was her final building block, though it seemed like it could undo what the meeting had thus far accomplished: give Serguey substantial reason to hope. “I heard they funded some of Felipe’s plays in exchange for contacts, but that he wasn’t directly involved with them. That’s why I wanted to meet again, and well, to tell you about the video and the letter.”

“What contacts?” Victor asked, his inflection like a rising tremor. He wanted no more compartmentalized details.

She fidgeted with the zipper sliders of her backpack. Victor had put her on the defensive, but Serguey’s interest in her answer dwarfed his urge to intervene.

“People willing to make public statements,” she said tenaciously, her chest suddenly swelling, “to write articles about the current situation in the arts. The kind of inside stuff that can give the Minister of Culture and Raul headaches.”

“Yes, but how do you know about Liberty Now?” Serguey said.

“I have sources.”

He could see in her reserved, indefatigable expression that she wouldn’t tender any more specifics.

“Liberty Now’s pretty passive compared to other organizations,” she added, “but I guess State Security doesn’t want to take any chances.”

“So you were right,” Victor said. “Dad just accepted some money for his plays, and that’s why they’re fucking with him. That’s why he’s a mercenary.”

The tide behind Claudia had retreated below the rocks. Mangled cartons and bent cans floated and bobbed in the confining space of a puddle. Serguey had witnessed both old men and children with hem-ripped shorts straddle the coastline, emptying cans and bottles of saltwater and hoarding them inside a bag. Would it all have been different if he and Victor had grown up in another neighborhood, with another father? Would this have been their playground?

“I’ve seen them go after people for a lot less,” Claudia said. “Sometimes they want to send a message. Sometimes they want to break up links, or land a bigger fish. When the Pope visited in ’98, they scooped up the opposition and kept them in jail until the Pope left. People have gone to prison for owning the wrong books. All the bloggers I know have been arrested multiple times. Things don’t have to make sense. It’s all about not loosening their grip on the rope too much.”

“Have you heard anything about a trial?” Serguey asked, afraid of the answer.

“Not yet.”

“If there’s a trial, then I’d definitely like to do the interviews.”

“That’s fine. Just keep in mind that by now, they must know I’ve been reporting on Felipe’s situation. If there’s going to be a trial, they might pick me up until it’s all over. That way I can’t report what’s happening.”

It should have been obvious, but he hadn’t consciously thought about the magnitude of what Claudia was risking. He waited a moment, then tried to infuse enough honesty into his look to make sure she wasn’t offended at his question: “Could someone else do it?”

“If I get detained, it’ll become news, believe me. My friends will know it’s in relation to your father’s case.”

“They might arrest us again,” Victor said.

“If they’re asking you guys questions, it means they don’t have what they want. That might not be good for you, but it could be good for Felipe.”

“They don’t have enough proof,” Serguey said. “I could tell right away.”

Claudia nodded slowly. “I’m sorry that they beat you.”

Victor slapped Serguey on the shoulder. “He took it like a champ.”

Never a missed opportunity, Serguey thought, for his brother to show off. “Can you find out more about what happened between Liberty Now and my dad?”

“Not without getting in some serious trouble.” She hooked her arms inside the straps of the backpack, wearing it like a vest. “Think of me more as a reporter than an investigative journalist. In your case, I made an exception because of our mutual friend.”

“I didn’t mean to pressure you or imply—”

She shook her head dismissively. “It’s fine. Have you located Mario? The police haven’t.”

“Not yet,” Victor said, his lips warping as if he were chewing something bitter.

“If you get to him before they do, maybe he can tell you more. That’s if he hasn’t left the country.”

Serguey fetched a button-sized rock from a crevice on the seawall and chucked it at the water, watching it sink. “He probably has.”

Claudia enfolded the bulging bag as if it were an extension of her abdomen. She looked to Serguey like a student from his high school days. Why such a young person could imperil her own safety for the sake of sharing information was a mystery to him. He wondered if she’d lost someone, if a relative or friend had been incarcerated. Motives were never transparent, not in Cuba, especially for those who took a vehement position for or against the government. In this instance, Serguey had trusted her blindly because he trusted Kiko. As he examined her words and demeanor—the narrow sample of interaction they’d had—he was left with the impression that she was someone who’d found her calling. Her aptitude matched her work. She could be a voice for newer generations, even if those generations had no idea who she was. She would always be more popular outside of Cuba, where people were allowed to freely read her reports, to access what was absent inside the island: newspapers and magazines with varying agendas and points of view. The available literature, as she’d pointed out, had been regulated for decades.

Serguey pondered how his father—an intellectual and sensible man—had not only lived with these truths but been affected by them in his core. If Serguey himself had been an artist, a creator, how would he have dealt with censorship and ideological incongruences from a government bent on squashing anyone at the first sign of dissent? Would he have joined in some kind of fight? Would he have spoken out and accepted contributions from Liberty Now? He would never know. He was not Felipe. But he was here speaking with Claudia, intent—now more than ever—on locating Mario. He’d been arrested and assaulted. He was a story, a piece of evidence, just like his father, in the condemnation of the state.

“I’ll comb through the requests for interviews,” Claudia said. “If any seem worth doing, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, I’ll try to get concrete information on your father’s status abroad and keep an ear out for a response from the government.”

Serguey expressed his gratitude.

Claudia dismissed it with an understated flapping of her hair. “If you find Mario, let Kiko know. It’s better if we continue to communicate through him.”

“You don’t exist,” Serguey said.

She smiled and kissed him on the cheek. Victor turned toward her, and she kissed him too. “See you, boys,” she said, not bothering to attach the backpack more comfortably on her body. She hurried across the avenue toward the entrance to the hotel.

It sounded like the frantic, discordant tapping of timbales. Ringing bicycle bells and the indistinct cacophony of human shouts convoyed the rambunctious music. Though he had no reason to think it, the first association Serguey’s mind made was riots, protests, unrest. But the metallic rat-tin-tan was approaching at an alarming speed. It couldn’t be on foot. Suddenly, a small, peculiar parade materialized. A red Jawa motorcycle led the procession. A balding man with a waist pack fastened to his belt stood on the motorcycle’s sidecar. He was snapping photographs of the scene behind him, his knees buoyed on the sidecar’s backrest. A few meters from the vehicle, just out of the smoke’s reach, a black man dressed in a white suit commandeered a bicycle, the handlebars shaking in spurts. He wore a matching headscarf, a bulk of exquisite dreadlocks jutting from its arrowhead-folded rear. A resplendently attractive woman in a modest wedding dress sat on the carrier. Her legs were on the same side, the bottom of her dress draped over one arm so that it wouldn’t jam the spokes. Numerous strings flung like appendages from the carrier to the ground, dragging a loud assortment of sundry-colored cans. Four additional cyclists encircled the cans, ringing their bells and waving at those who stopped to watch the curious celebration.

“Only in Cuba,” Victor said, grinning.

Though Serguey doubted his brother was right, the picture did seem surreal, exclusively Cuban somehow, more genuine than tourists riding around in vintage vehicles.

The festivity took a few minutes to recede from their gaze toward the water. Victor stopped at a greasy cart to get a pizza. The vendor’s sign read: queso y jamón — $7. The words y Jamón had been crossed out. The brothers were in on the ruse. The vendor never had ham; he just wanted to give the illusion that sometimes he did. Victor folded his pizza—a round, spongy, rim-charred breading with bubbling cheese that solidified too quickly—and presented it to Serguey.

“No, thanks,” he said. It was nothing like the one carried by the boy who’d banged into Alida the night of the play, the kind Gimenez would have treated him and Anabel to.

As they returned to the apartment, they spoke about Serguey and Anabel’s food situation. Victor was more than happy to help in any way he could. He revealed how much money he’d saved with the same swagger he disclosed other details of his life. The amount impressed Serguey. For every time his brother had been detained, it seemed, he’d gotten away plenty with bigger deals. A clever delinquent after all.

“I’m giving the money to Anabel,” Victor said. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, but if I had a wife, I’d give it to her.”

His brother also convinced him that his contacts were reliable. His arrests were the result of excessive ambition, he said, always wanting to make an extra buck. The people he’d been involved with were trustworthy.

Victor bit into his pizza with childish abandon. Like the wedding procession, Serguey found this sight—an insolent, rakish, fickle young man with pizza sauce slobbered on his chin—a truer representation of Havana than what was sold to the world. He put out his hand with a knowing frown.

“Have at it,” his brother said, giving him what remained of the pizza.

At home, they found the living room and kitchen empty. Serguey searched for a note from Anabel but didn’t find one. Then he realized the bedroom door was closed. Anabel was sitting against the headboard, her nose chafed, her eyes flaring with the red-tinged glow of a recent cry. Serguey felt a manic pulse at the base of his throat, irrationally believing that Anabel’s condition was somehow related to Alida. He signaled for Victor, who was standing by the entrance to the bedroom, to go down the hall, to the balcony.

He sat by his wife’s feet, afraid to ask her the obvious.

“I’m never trusting anyone again,” she said, her voice fracturing, yet subtly charged with rage. “We can’t be this fucking stupid. We can’t.”

Now he had to ask. “What happened?”

“Gimenez left ten minutes ago.”

“He was here?”

“It’s like he knows when you leave.”

A surge of anger rose up in Serguey. “What did he do?”

She sniffed and dabbed her nostrils with a handkerchief. “He charged in here and called me a ‘weasel.’ He said it was all my fault because I’d manipulated you, that I’d taken advantage of him to get a house and a cushy life. He said I was the worst kind of woman, and that we had seventy-two hours to leave the apartment or he’ll come with the police. I swear on my own mother, Serguey, I wanted to break that Chinese vase he left us on his head.”

Serguey slid toward her, his breathing intensifying. “I’m sorry.”

“He said that if you were a real man and we had any self-respect, we would’ve left this place already, and that with your dad and your brother, it was a miracle you weren’t in prison. I told him to get the fuck out of my house. The son of a bitch smiled and said, ‘There’s a misconception.’ I told him that I could tell why his sister had left him, why he didn’t have a wife. He didn’t like it, because he walked right out, saying you can find him at the Ministry.”

Even as his head started to cloud and his body jumped from the bed, part of him understood that this situation had been coming; they had stretched it well past its sustainable point. Gimenez was holding all the cards.

Serguey grabbed Anabel’s keys and his own.

“Let that asshole have it,” she urged him on.

“Where are you going?” Victor said from the balcony when he saw him at the front door.

“I’ll be back soon,” Serguey said. “Stay with her, please.”

He didn’t give his brother a chance to respond. The instant he locked the door, he saw Carmina open hers. Her face was squashed into a scowl.

“Serguey, we need to speak,” she said, blocking the corridor.

“Fuck off, Carmina.” He squeezed past her.

“I’m going to report you!” she said, wagging her finger.

He paused on the top step, his right hand clinching the rail. “You know what you are?” He started to approach her. “You’re a rat, feeding on the crumbs they throw your way. You ever wonder why your family only comes to see you once a year? Why your oldest son left on a raft without telling you and never called you again? Oh yeah, I know about that.”

Carmina struggled to remain stoic. “You know nothing of my son!”

“Do you think you’re the only one who snoops around? If you want to report me, go ahead. Keep track of your little numbers, of the neighborhood watch, of who’s coming in and out of the building, and keep hoping to get a rice cooker out of it. Because that’s what your life is worth. The government you so devotedly serve made you a bottom-feeder, and you gladly accepted the role.”

She arched her chest and head toward him, her mouth tensed, the bottom frame of her eyes overloaded with tears. “What about you? Don’t you work for the Ministry? Didn’t you sell out like everyone else?”

The evidence of his own hypocrisy didn’t deter him. “You aren’t fooling anyone, Carmina. We all know who you really are, you old, bitter bitch.”

“Coward! Counterrevolutionary! Traitor!”

Her screams, reverberating and chasing him down the stairs, sounded to him like a glorious, symphonic march.