Paul Christopher - Valley of the Templars

“They have friends in Miami who send them the money to fix them up,” said Eddie, his voice quiet. He stared right ahead. “And remember-half the drivers work for secret police.”

Holliday chose the ’49 Dodge-his uncle Henry had driven one all through Holliday’s childhood and his early adolescence. It reminded him of the smell of rubber on a hot day and egg salad sandwiches when he and Henry and his cousin Peggy went on camping trips.

Like many things in Havana, the Hotel Nacional was definitely a blast from the past. It had been built in the ’30s by the famous New York architects McKim, Meade and Wright, and bore a strong resemblance to the Breakers, the Beaux-Arts hotel in Palm Beach. It wasn’t surprising since the Breakers architects, Shultze and Walker, were contemporaries with McKim, building such well-known hotels as the Pierre, the Waldorf-Astoria and the Sherry Netherland.

Stepping into the narrow lobby, its high ceiling done in dark coffered oak, the walls a pale creamy yellow, Holliday was uneasily reminded of the scene in The Shining when Danny Torrance was rumbling down the halls on his Big Wheel, Stanley Kubrick’s camera looking over his shoulder.

They booked the Rita Hayworth two-bedroom suite and settled in. It was no five-star hotel as advertised, but it wasn’t too bad; somewhere above a Best Western but not as good as the Waldorf. The suite had a balcony that looked out over the Malecon seawall to the ocean, and that was certainly something. Eddie did a cursory check for electronic bugs-usually not used in places like the Nacional according to Eddie-unless the Special Brigade had some interest in you, in which case it would have been likely they’d be taken to the dungeons under Morro Castle on the other side of the harbor and fed to the few remaining rats in the city-you don’t have rats where there is nothing for them to eat. When Eddie was satisfied they ordered a bottle of Havana Club Rum, some ice and some Cokes and a Cohiba Behike 52, if they had it. When the rum, the Cokes and the cigar arrived on its own small silver serving platter with a cutter and a small silver receptacle full of matches, Holliday and Eddie sat out on the balcony to watch the sun go down and figure out the next step in the plan to find Eddie’s brother, Domingo.

“You must remember, Doc, this is not the Cuba of my youth,” cautioned Eddie, puffing on the aromatic cigar. He sipped his rum and stared thoughtfully out over the Malecon and the darkening sea beyond. “In my early days, when I was in the Pioneers, they were my best days, you understand? Everything was ahead of us. We went out into the fields each year to gather vegetables and to cut the cane and pick the fruit and it meant something. Fidel would lead us to better times, better days ahead. Everything was about the future, and for a while it was true. Before Fidel a black man could never have gone to university. Most didn’t even go to school at all, but now we were equal, all of us, men, women, black, white, mulatto…none of that mattered…as long as we listened to Fidel and to Che.”

“So, what happened?” Holliday asked, enjoying the faint but cooling onshore breeze coming up from the ocean and riffling the curtains behind them.

“The lies began. Fidel would blame the ‘embargo’ for everything…there was a food shortage because of the ‘embargo,’ a clothing shortage ‘embargo,’ always the same, but we could see it-a ten-ton truck packed with tomatoes rotting in the sun because no one had organized transportation or distribution…. There were rumors that all was not well among El Comandante and his friends. Have you ever heard the name Manuel Pineiro Losada?”

“I don’t think so.” Holliday shrugged.

“He was Fidel’s head of the Direccion General de Inteligencia, DGI. Cuban intelligence. Between Losada and Fidel they convinced Che that the next step in the socialization of the Americas lay in Bolivia, of all places. Bolivia is more than four thousand kilometers from Cuba-what did it have to do with us? But Fidel and Losada told him the Bolivian Communist Party would rise to his aid. It wasn’t true, just like it wasn’t true for the poor bastardos at the Bay of Pigs. He left Cuba with his little group of less than twenty men in the middle of February, and by April he was dead, his guerrilla force wiped out, betrayed to the CIA by Losada.”

“Interesting piece of history, but what does it have to do with right now?” Holliday asked, cracking an ice cube between his teeth.

“People stopped believing in the lies. How do you say, the people and the government became…isolated from each other. First the Russians came and brought their KGB, then the Chinese and then finally we had no one. Nothing worked. There was no food, no coffee, no parts to replace the aircraft and the tanks. There was only the black market and the generals smuggling drugs. We traded doctors and engineers to Venezuela for gasoline, but that was all. No one cared about Fidel or Raul. They only believed in the Secret Police in their big houses with swimming pools in Atabey. Like a famous writer said… ‘ El emperador ya no responde a su telefono. ’ The emperor no longer answers his telephone. Fidel is over. There are two Cubas now, the people and the generals, each general with… su propio pedazo de la torta. His own piece of the pie, yes? There is no government at all.”

“The Middle Ages,” said Holliday quietly. Eddie was telling him that Cuba had collapsed into fiefdoms, lords and vassals, masters and slaves; it was the ultimate expression of rich and poor; Blade Runner where the technology stopped dead in 1959. A Clockwork Orange in a 1958 Edsel. Anarchy.

“ Si ,” answered Eddie with a sneer, “and not one black man among them.” He shook his head sadly. “This is not a revolution I can believe in. It is not a revolution anyone believes in anymore. Fidel speaks, but there are no ears to listen.”

“So, what do we do?”

“Just remember that anyone who walks behind you who looks like he is eating well is probably Secret Police, and bring a great many of those American dollars with you…. There will be lots of soborno to pay.”

“Bribes?”

“ Si, mi colonel , lots of bribes.”

They met the man at La Taberna de la Muralles, a cafe and bar on a small cobbled plaza in Old Havana, the following day at lunchtime. He was in his fifties, with a rugged, clean-shaven face that had seen a lot of sun. He wore a porkpie hat that made him look a little bit like Gene Hackman in the French Connection , dark glasses and he had a napkin tucked into his white silk guayabera shirt as he ate a plate of assorted pastelitos -Cuban puff pastry stuffed with savory fillings. His gleaming hair looked too perfectly black to be true.

“Who is he?” Holliday asked as they approached his table on the crowded outdoor patio.

“His name is Cesar Diaz. He is a policeman, a detective, in fact,” said Eddie.

“We’re buying information from a cop ?” Holliday asked.

“He is the brother of my sister’s husband,” explained Eddie.

“Still…,” worried Holliday.

“The police are as poor as the people they’re supposed to serve. Five pesos a month doesn’t buy anything on the black market. They have to make their way just like everyone else.”

They sat down and Eddie did the introductions. Diaz offered them pastries from his plate, but they declined. He ordered coffee for them all, wiped the sugar off his lips with his makeshift bib and sat back in his chair. He really was beginning to look like Popeye Doyle.

“Eddie Cabrera, it has been a very long time,” said Diaz, speaking slightly accented English.