Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

The day was perfectly clear, no mist on the water, and from the balcony we could see out over the reef, to the larger, sparkling blue of Nipe Bay. There was a boat heading for Levisa — that’s Nicaro’s bay, where the nickel processing plant was. Whenever it rained, which it just had, the roads turned to mud, and no one could get past Mayarí up to Nicaro. Instead they forked left into Preston and took boats from our dock through the channel, past Saetía and into Levisa Bay. The nickel mine in Nicaro, which was owned by the U.S. government, had just reopened. The government built it during World War II, and shut it down when the war ended. They were starting it up again because of the war in Korea. They needed nickel for armor plating, airplane cladding, all sorts of munitions. It was a serious operation, and a bunch of Americans were coming over to run it.

The boat passing by was filled with people, American-looking in their fancy travel clothes, ladies in white cotton gloves, and kids who had that fussy Sears catalog look about them, all of them pale as ghosts. One woman had a nervous little dog in her lap that kept yapping at the oarsmen, the oarsmen laughing back at the little dog like it was the stupidest thing they’d ever seen. “Yap yap yap!” Its little bark echoed across the bay. I said I’d heard they were all coming over to work in Nicaro.

“Another boatload of losers,” Curtis said. He started carrying on about people coming to Cuba once they’ve screwed things up at home. He said people used to move West in frontier times when they’d screwed up, got a bad reputation, or had trouble with the law. Go to a new town, the next county over, where no one knew them. “Now they just come here,” he said.

“Maybe some people like it better over here, and that’s why they come,” I said.

“You telling me all these Americans move here because they want to? To live with a bunch of niggers on the edge of a swamp?”

“I was born here, Curtis. My father’s been here since he graduated from agriculture school. He moved my mother over. It’s our home.”

“Uncle Rudy says it’s a loser’s paradise.”

“I don’t know what losers he’s talking about. My father’s not a loser.”

“Not here he ain’t,” Curtis said. “He’s el jefe. The big boss. Like Uncle Rudy says: if you can’t serve in heaven, might as well rule in hell .”

“Just because your father killed someone”—I’d never said a word to Curtis about Hatch’s murder rap, it just came out—“doesn’t mean everyone around here is a fugitive. That’s your family.”

“How do you know what your father did before he moved here? Maybe he knocked up some girl, a cousin or something, and he had to scram—”

That’s when I punched him. It’s possible I knocked him out with one punch. Curtis fell back and landed on the balustrade of the balcony, and the balustrade must have been rotten because it gave way. He pitched off the balcony, backward. I leaned over the edge, panicked, and almost fell off myself. He’d dropped two stories. Landed flat on his back on the sandy ground. I hadn’t meant to hit him so hard. I knew how to box, and hitting hard came naturally. The Cubans had a boxing ring set up in the cockfighting round when it wasn’t cockfighting season, and I went down there and sparred. They had a guy from the mill, Luís Galindez, who coached me and Del. Later, when I went to military academy, I was on the boxing team and everyone called me Cuba, Cuba Stites.

I ran down the hall, took the main stairs to the foyer two at a time, flew through the lobby and past all that sheet-draped furniture, raising dust and sending that damp, moldy smell up to my nose. The front door was open and light flooded in, so bright I couldn’t see a thing, light flooding through like it was a door into heaven. The inside of the house felt like a completely different world than the one outside — different light, a different climate — much cooler, and the sound of the ocean muted through the boarded windows. I remembering hoping that when I got outside, I wouldn’t have punched Curtis, and he wouldn’t have fallen two stories off the balcony, like it was just a nightmare dreamed up by the house. Maybe that’s what Perequín meant when he said it was haunted, a place that lets your imagination run wild, or where you end up accidentally pitching another kid off a balcony.

Curtis’s face was covered with blood, and he was out cold, either from the punch or from the fall, or maybe both. I shouted for help. Hatch and Perequín came running over. Hatch was calm. He asked me what happened, picked up Curtis, and carried him down to the shore. I wish I wouldn’t have seen it, but Curtis peed in his pants in Hatch’s arms. I guess that’s what happens when the body’s in shock and you’re unconscious. Hatch laid him down in one of the boats, and we set off for Preston, to take him to the company hospital. Perequín was whispering Hail Marys and shaking his head while he rowed. He said it was the house, that he knew there was trouble inside. Hatch had a balled-up shirt pressed to Curtis’s nose, to try to stop the bleeding. Hatch said, “Son, wake up. Can you hear me? Son?” Curtis’s eyes fluttered. Hatch shook him gently. Curtis finally came-to. He opened his eyes, sat up, and started swinging at me like a wild man. Hatch pinned him down. “Hey, hey, easy, Curtis. You better just rest.” Curtis closed his eyes. He was out cold again.

We had him under Doctor Romero’s care in maybe an hour. Curtis woke up, and Doctor Romero said he seemed okay, that he had a concussion and they would monitor him for a few days to make sure there was nothing seriously wrong. Dr. Romero said that he weathered the fall because he was a kid and flexible and strong. His nose wasn’t broken; faces just bleed a lot, this I know from boxing.

While Curtis was in the hospital, I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened and what he’d said about the Americans going to Nicaro. I started wondering if maybe people did come to Cuba because they had to, because they’d failed in some way at home and needed to escape this or that fate. Hatch Allain killed a man with his bare hands — that’s what everybody said. But whether or not you actually committed a crime, moving to another country meant getting away from all the people who had decided what kind of person you were and how you were supposed to live your life. Like Panda moving into Daddy’s Pullman car, except Panda hadn’t done anything wrong. She just wanted a fresh start, away from her family. But let’s say you had done something wrong, committed a crime. A fresh start in a place like Cuba meant you could be wanted by the law at home, and it wouldn’t matter because you were under a different set of laws. Not Cuba’s laws. You were under the company’s laws.

Did the company care that Hatch had killed a man? They knew about his murder rap. At the end there was a lot of talk of where the Allains would go because they couldn’t go back to the States. The company hired Hatch because he knew how to handle black people. “Take care of niggers” is what Daddy said. But what if the company hired him because he was a murderer? There was a Rural Guard in Oriente, a special army that patrolled the countryside to protect landowners. One of the captains, Sosa Blanco, had been in prison for murder. Near the end, he torched the workers’ shanties in Nicaro and was stringing the blacks up in trees around Mayarí. He was a monster who was useful to Batista and his military cronies, perfect for scaring the hell out of everybody and ruling with an iron hand. That’s what people said about Hatch — that he ruled with an iron hand. Then again they said it about Daddy, and Daddy wasn’t escaping any murder rap. Daddy was an upstanding citizen, a Mississippi gentleman in a white duck suit. His father owned a country store and most of the land in the county where Daddy was from. But the workers were scared of Daddy, and so was I. And maybe like with Hatch, what was scary about him was part of what made him a good jefe.