Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

Saetía was a perfectly protected cove, with pink sand that sparkled like it had ground-up diamonds in it, and reefs that were teeming with sea life. You could stick a pole with a sharp hook on the end of it into the clear green water and pull out one octopus after another, lay dip nets, and when you dragged them out they were filled with enormous green lobsters. The island was covered with tropical fruit trees — mango, papaya, breadfruit, rose apple, soursop, mamey, flowers as big as your head drooping off the trees and vines. There was an opening in the reef to get into the bay, and boats could clear it only at high tide. It was scary going in, but it was the best fishing in eastern Cuba. Saetía was United Fruit Company property, and Cubans weren’t allowed to go there. Poachers tried to come in all the time. The company had a guard patrolling the bay to keep them out. In 1947, Fidel Castro supposedly swam several miles to the shores of Saetía, after an aborted invasion of the Dominican Republic he and some other Cubans had planned, in hopes of overthrowing the dictator Trujillo. I hear Raúl Castro owns Saetía now, that it’s his private vacation spot, which doesn’t surprise me. Whatever was ours, those brothers made a point of making theirs. Fidel still talks about Saetía and Preston and the rest of it when he makes his multihour speeches.

We were all thrilled about the fishing trip, five days of living off the sea. Del stayed home, and at the time I couldn’t figure out why — I thought he was crazy to miss out. I’m sure it was because of Tee-Tee. He was always trying to figure out where she’d be and what she’d be doing. She definitely wouldn’t be over at Saetía, catching octopus with a bunch of boys, and maybe he hoped that with Hatch and the boys gone, he might have a chance at seeing her. I remember that Mother was happy that Del was staying, because Daddy had gone to Havana to meet with Batista. This was March of 1952. Batista had taken over in a coup, and there were all sorts of negotiations to figure out with the company. Daddy knew about the coup before it even happened. Deke Havelin, a businessman in Havana who was a family friend, sent a telex to let him know. The Americans all considered it a positive thing. Certainly Daddy did. United Fruit had a relationship with Batista — he’d grown up in a United Fruit town, had even worked for the company, and he was very probusiness. I think Daddy respected Batista, but it was difficult to tell how much Daddy respected anyone. He had a way of treating you like you were a very clever person, and then again a total idiot.

Mitty, Curtis, a nephew of Mr. LaDue’s who was visiting from Missouri, and I all helped load the boat with supplies — rice, cooking oil, sugar, coffee. Hatch passed a case of his Methuselah rum to me and told me to be careful, and to handle it like it was a carton of hen’s eggs. We had three Cubans with us, an old guy named Perequín and his two grown boys. The sons rowed, and the old man sat in the boat chewing on his cigar — he didn’t really smoke, he just chewed on a cold cigar stub jammed in his mouth. Barely talked, but he knew everything about the sea. He and his sons guided us through the reef, took care of the boats, cooked for us.

The first two days were paradise. We caught yellowtail, black grouper — we called it chedna — red grouper, strawberry snapper, and octopus, which the old man and his sons pounded on rocks and hung up on a line to dry. They chopped it into little pieces, boiled it, fried it, and stirred it in with a pot of rice. They cooked what we caught and served everything with fried plantains, rice, beans, and thick wedges of avocado. Saetía had once been a company orchard. Mostly citrus, but there were avocado trees as well, so heavy with fruit they were all leaning over. We ate heaping plates of food, and then everybody collapsed right on the beach. We slept on company sugar sacks, clean ones, laid over ficus leaves that we stripped from the trees. The second night it rained, and the Cubans put up canvas and we slept under that.

There was an old United Fruit guesthouse on Saetía, near the main cove. When I was little we used to stay there. It looked like something from Savannah, Georgia, three floors of ornate, wraparound balconies. When we had important visitors from Havana or the States, the company threw elaborate parties at the Saetía guesthouse. We took the seventy-five-foot company yacht over, the Mollie and Me, and if that wasn’t big enough, they’d strap a sand barge behind the yacht and tow the rest of the guests. The house had twenty bedrooms, beautiful mahogany and purple-heartwood furniture, a giant old-fashioned staircase with a curved balustrade. Crystal chandeliers, all the linens monogrammed with UF Co on them. A full staff lived in the house, just to take care of it. They had stopped growing citrus on Saetía years earlier; it wasn’t profitable the way sugar was. The fruit had to be shipped in air-conditioned containers, it was a small crop, and they didn’t want to deal with it anymore. For a while, they had just one Jamaican lady living in the house. Little by little, the company let it go. By the time we went fishing with Hatch, no one lived there. We still had our big company picnics on the beach at Saetía, and people would sit on the steps of the house for shade, but the place was falling apart, windows all boarded over. It was still painted United Fruit’s trademark mustard yellow, but the paint was faded and peeling, half the red clay tiles had slid off the roof, and porch floorboards were missing where the wood had rotted. Perequín said it was haunted.

The door of that house was maybe twelve feet tall, and nailed shut. Our third day at Saetía Curtis and I pried it open with a claw hammer. There were little bats hanging upside down on the top of the door frame, asleep — the middle of the day is the middle of their night. When we finally got the door open, they stayed attached to the frame, hanging upside down like decoration, like those tassels along the bottom of a curtain. Curtis carried a flashlight, and we each had a twenty-gauge shotgun. I don’t know what we thought — shoot a ghost, maybe. The furniture was covered with white sheets, and cobwebs hung from every corner, wafting in the air that blew in through the front door. It was the same house where I had stayed as a little boy, but it wasn’t the same house. It had been a showpiece for the company, and now it was an abandoned wreck, the floor covered with dirt and mouse droppings. It smelled of dampness and mold and trapped air. There were beehives wedged against the hardwood beams of the dining room ceiling, and Curtis and I aimed our shotguns up at the hives and fired to knock them down and get the honey out. We put huge holes into the ceiling of the dining room, where my family had hosted formal dinners with the Cabots and the Lodges, the du Ponts and the Bacardi people.

On a mild night in the old days, the servants made up beds on the second- and third-floor balconies, and we slept out there. I was maybe three years old, but I remember lying in an outdoor bed, listening for the watchman to blow his conch to announce a ship was coming in, which told the pilots to go out and meet it. They’d raise a flag, one or two flags, which told you how many ships, and how many pilots they needed. The head watchmen, Chatsworth — Chatty, we called him — gave me a conch shell and taught me how to blow it. Mother had it preserved for me in leaded silver. Chatty said that during World War II, he watched from Saetía as our United Fruit ships got shelled by German U-boats. We lost an entire company fleet.

I wanted to see the upstairs rooms where we used to stay. “You first,” Curtis said. Beyond the curve of the balustrade we couldn’t see anything, just darkness. The smell of mildew drifted down the stairs. “I’ll let you hold the flashlight,” I offered, “if you go first.” Curtis didn’t buy that. We went up side by side, stopping every few steps to shine the flashlight around and listen for creepy noises. At the top of the stairs was a hallway, all the doors along it shut. I toed one of the doors — it wasn’t latched, and it swung open and banged against the inside wall. Light leaked in through the slats of the shuttered balcony. The room was empty, no furniture, nothing but a stack of newspapers tied with cord — ancient editions of the Havana Post, the pink pages faded to a yellowish-peach. Suddenly we heard a noise. We both practically jumped through the ceiling. It was just the watchman blowing his conch. We went into the room and opened the balcony shutters to get a look.