Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

Annie said she’d closed the shutters on account of the air. There was an awful haze, and it was tickling her nose and making her hoarse. She said it must have been those guajiros burning their trash again. Annie didn’t like the campesinos. She was a house servant, and that’s a different class.

I sat down in the kitchen with the new issue of Unifruitco, our company magazine. It came out bimonthly, meaning the news was always a bit stale. This was January 1958, and on the front page was a photo of my brother and Phillip Mackey posing with a swordfish they’d caught in Nipe Bay, back in October. They’d won first prize in the fall fishing tournament. It was strange to see that photograph, now that both of them were gone and my brother no longer cared about things such as fishing tournaments. On the next page was Daddy with Batista and Ambassador Smith on our yacht the Mollie and Me . I flipped through the pages while Annie made pastry dough. She cut the dough into circles, put cheese and guava paste into the little circles, folded them over into half moons, and spread them on a baking sheet. Annie’s pastelitos de guayaba, warm from the oven, were the most delicious things in the world. Some of the Americans in Preston didn’t allow their servants to cook native. Mother was considerably more open-minded about these things, and she absolutely loved some of the Cuban dishes. Mother didn’t cook. She made lists for Annie. Annie would take a huge red snapper and stuff it with potatoes, olives, and celery, then marinate it in butter and lime juice and bake it in the oven. That was my favorite. Six months earlier, in the summer of ’57, when I turned thirteen, Annie said that because I was a young man and would be grown up before she knew it, she wanted to make me a rum cake for my wedding. Thirteen-year-old boys are not exactly thinking about marriage. Sure I’d fooled around with girls, but there wasn’t any formal courtship going on. A rum cake will keep for ten or fifteen years, and Annie figured that was enough time for me to grow up and find a wife. She had the guys at the company machine shop make a five-tier tin just for that cake. The tin was painted white, with Kimball C. Stites handpainted on top, and handles on the sides for pulling out the cake layers. I don’t know what happened to the cake or the tin with my name on it. Lost in the rush of leaving, like so many of our things.

Annie was putting her pastelitos in the oven when I heard Daddy’s footsteps pounding down the stairs, and Mother calling after him, “Malcolm! Malcolm, please in God’s name be careful !”

I ran into the foyer and met Daddy at the bottom of the stairs. He didn’t look at me, just charged past like I was invisible, opened the front door, and took the veranda steps two at a time. I followed him, running down the garden path in my pajamas. He went around to the servants’ quarters behind the house and pounded on Hilton Hardy’s door. Hilton was Daddy’s chauffeur.

“Hilton! Wake up!” He pounded on the door again. That was when I noticed Daddy still had on his rumpled pajama shirt underneath his suit jacket.

“Mr. Stites, Mr. Hardy visiting his people in Cayo Mambí,” Annie called from the window of the butler’s pantry, her voice muffled through the shut jalousies. “He got permission from Mrs. Stites.”

Daddy swore out loud and rushed to the garage where Hilton kept the company limousine, a shiny black Buick. We had two of them — Dynaflows, with the chromed, oval-shaped ventiports along the front fenders. Daddy opened the garage doors and got in the car, but he didn’t start it. He got back out and shouted up to the house, “Annie! Where does Hilton keep the keys to this goddamn thing?”

“On a hook in there, Mr. Stites. Mr. Hardy have all the keys on hooks,” she called back.

Daddy found the keys, revved the Buick, and backed it out of the garage. I watched from the path and didn’t dare ask what was happening. He roared down the driveway, wheels spitting up gravel, and took a right on La Avenida.

That was the first time in my life I ever saw Daddy behind the wheel of his own car. He always had a driver. Daddy wore a white duck suit every day, perfectly creased, the bejesus starched out of it. A white shirt, white tie, and his panama hat. Every afternoon Hilton Hardy took him on his rounds in the Buick limousine. At each stop a secretary served Daddy a two-cent demitasse of Cuban coffee. They knew exactly what time he was coming and just how he liked his demitasse: a thimble-sized shot, no sugar. A “demi demi,” he used to say. According to him, he never got sick because his stomach was coated with the stuff. Daddy was old-fashioned. He had his habits and he took his time. He was not a man who rushed.

I remember how the cane cutters lived: in one-room shacks called bohios. Dirt floors, a pot in the middle of the room, no windows, no plumbing, no electricity. The only light was what came through the open doorway and filtered into the cracks between the thatched palm walls. They slept in hammacas. They were squatters, but the company tolerated it because they had to live somewhere during the harvest. The rest of the year — the dead time, they called it — they were desolajos. I don’t know what they did. Wandered the countryside looking for work and food, I guess. In the shantytown where the cane cutters lived — it’s called a batey — there were naked children running everywhere. None of those people had shoes, and their feet had hard shells of calloused skin around them. They cooked their meals outdoors, on mangrove charcoal. Got their water from a spigot at the edge of the cane fields. They had to carry their water in hand buckets, but the company let them take as much as they wanted. It was certainly a better deal than the mine workers got over in Nicaro. Those people were employees of the U.S. government, and they had to get their water from the river — the Levisa River — where they dumped the tailings from the nickel mine. The Nicaro workers drank from the river, bathed in the river, washed their clothes in the river. If you wash your bike in the Levisa River after it rains, it gets shiny clean. That’s a Cuban thing. I don’t know why, but it really works. After it rained, everybody was down there, boys and grown men wading into the river in their underwear, washing cars and bicycles.

The American kids on La Avenida weren’t supposed to go beyond the gates of Preston, down to the cane cutters’ batey. I think it was a company policy. Inside the gates was okay. Beyond the gates, you were looking for trouble. But Hatch Allain’s son Curtis Junior and I went down there all the time. We were boys, and curious. We sneaked into native dances. Curtis liked Cuban girls. That was a thing — some of the American kids only dated Cubans. Phillip Mackey and Everly Lederer’s sister Stevie from over in Nicaro were both like that, and they both got shipped off to boarding school in the States. Though in Phillip’s case it wasn’t just girls but the trouble he and my brother got into together, helping the rebels. The Cuban girls never gave poor Curtis the chance to get in any trouble. He was dirty and his ears stuck out, and the girls just didn’t like him. I tried to tell him that you have to be a little aloof, a little bit take-it-or-leave-it, even if it isn’t how you really feel, but Curtis just didn’t get it.

It was Daddy’s idea to give the cane cutters plots of land so they could feed themselves, grow yucca and sweet potatoes. He believed in self-sufficiency. He brought over Rev. Crim, who ran United Fruit’s agricultural school. The cane cutters’ kids were mostly illiterate. They studied practical things: farming, housekeeping, Methodist values. Daddy was conscientious about offering education, but he wouldn’t have taken urchins up off the street like my mother wanted to do. My mother was a real liberal. She fed people at the back door. She would have had them inside the house if my father didn’t put limits on her. If there was a child out in the batey who was ill or crippled or retarded, or had some sort of disease, Mother sent someone to pick him or her up and take the child to the company hospital. Christmastime, she went out into the countryside on her horse with gifts and toys. She wanted to go alone, but my father wouldn’t allow it. A United Fruit security guard rode along behind her. I guess they were more like police officers than guards; they carried guns and guamparas — that’s like a machete, with a big, flat blade for slapping people. My mother rode her horse all over the countryside. She once brought the National Geographic folks on a tour, and they took a lot of pictures. That is still the finest magazine to me. When my mother rode up, the Cubans streamed out of their houses and gathered around her. They loved her. They wanted to touch her. She had that effect.