Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

I’m sure Mother saw them. They might have seen us, because when I sat back down, they were gone. Strange to think they’d rushed off like we were the police, or the Rural Guard, or what was worse, like we were total strangers.

Deke Havelin was the type of guy who joked loudly and in front of Dolly that he was “married but single.” Or “married but looking”—that was his other one. He came off like a swinger, rayon magnate, ladies’ man. It was a performance. Dolly called all the shots, and he adored her.

Daddy told everyone about seeing Mother on the road in Indiana and saying to himself here comes this angel. Mother did everything right. She was attractive and elegantly put together, and she took excellent care of herself. Never lost her cool, rode her horse out into the countryside to take sick or retarded children to the company hospital. Mother was perfect, but people don’t always want perfection.

Why Daddy was so reckless that afternoon still vexes me. Either he thought we were at the Yacht Club tea, which is where the Havelins were, or he just decided to take his chances. Or maybe he knew she could bear it.

People say you discover someone’s secret and suddenly he or she feels like a stranger. The older man sitting with the girl didn’t feel like a stranger. It was my father, equal parts old-fashioned gentleman and Mississippi hillbilly, white ducks and a demi-demi. Daddy, who was intimate with that girl like he was intimate with Mother, if he was intimate with Mother. I’ll gladly remain ignorant about that. I don’t know who she was or if he saw her regularly or what. But he was sitting like a patient father, that girl licking her ice cream methodically, seriously, the way kids do.

When we got home to Preston, Del’s bag was still in the hall. Mother fainted. Hilton Hardy and Henry Das carried her upstairs while Daddy and I unloaded the car. Hilton and Henry normally refused to speak or even look at each other, something to do with Henry being part Hindu. There was all sorts of hairsplitting among those guys, Chinese, black, mulatto, what have you. Mother and Daddy thought it was cute that the chauffeur snubbed the butler. They talked about Henry and Hilton not mixing like it was sibling rivalry.

Daddy made phone calls. Crim, Mackey, Allain. He called Diaz-Hart. Even Lito Gonzalez. Lito Gonzalez spoke perfect English, but Daddy spoke Spanish to him on the phone. I’d seen him do that, speak Spanish to Gonzalez while Gonzalez responded in English. Daddy said Gonzalez was one of those types who cared only about money and hated Americans. “Stab you in the back first chance he gets,” Daddy said. The phone rang, and it wasn’t Crim or Diaz-Hart. It was Gonzalez.

After he hung up, Daddy said it looked like Del might have accidentally crossed into rebel territory and we would have to figure out a way to get him out safely.

A month later, our cane fields were torched. The blaze burned for almost a week, until rain finally fell and drenched the flames. Afterward, the workers slashed and crushed the burned cane, fed it into the mill rollers in blackened, gummy masses. If they could get it all processed within a week, Mr. LaDue said, the stalks would still have some sugar content. The rain had turned the town into a giant wet ashtray, and then the mill was flowing burned sugar into the boilers. It was different from the smell of cane fields on fire. More acrid and metallic, like poisoned air hitting my tongue. It made me think about the warm, malty smell we were accustomed to, and how pure it was.

In an abandoned hut out in the cane cutters’ batey, the Allain brothers had found stacks of notices calling for a strike, and flyers with arson instructions and diagrams: tie a kerosene-soaked rag to the tail of a rat and let him loose in the cane. A cat would work, too. That’s why no one had come to help put out the fire. They were honoring the strike. Everyone came back to work, and because Daddy needed them, he didn’t have a choice but to allow it. Daddy had me helping out, mostly just watching as workers unloaded cane cars, keeping an eye on his “peóns,” as he put it. When I was little I didn’t know what that meant. “An animal that talks,” Daddy said. They saved what they could, but we lost almost three hundred million pounds of sugar. A quarter of the yield.

Batista’s Rural Guard opened a garrison in Preston, and suddenly there were Cuban officers in khaki uniforms patrolling with guns, and they weren’t shy about using them. That’s how these things work. The crackdown after the ruin and hell-raising. Cubans had a five-o’clock curfew, no exceptions. To prevent people from hiding weapons, Cuban women weren’t allowed to wear the sack dresses that were popular at the time, and the men had to tuck in their shirts. The Rural Guard raided an all-black club in Levisa, the Maceo, and took some of the men in for questioning. One of the officers came and knocked on our door late, after midnight. Henry Das answered, and the officer said they wanted to speak with me. Henry Das assumed they had the name wrong and meant Daddy, but the officer said no, we need to speak with the boy. Henry woke me. I got dressed and told Mother what was going on — Daddy was in Havana on business — and Hilton Hardy took me up to the Rural Guard station. They had all these black guys with their hands chained behind their backs. They brought one of them out. The captain, Sosa Blanco, asked, “Do you know this nigger?” It was the Lederers’ servant. That curious boy who’d come to Preston with Mr. Bloussé. Whenever I went to the Lederers he seemed to disappear, as if he were avoiding me. I got the feeling that he felt found out. Suddenly, he was standing there in chains, telling Captain Sosa Blanco, “He knows me. This boy knows me. Tell them you know me.” I will never forget it. It was as if we’d been having a conversation all along, even if we’d never acknowledged that we knew each other from so many years earlier. There was no question of whether he was innocent or guilty. He’d seen no reason to address me out loud until that moment. It was judicious, to say the least. “He’s innocent,” I said, but there was only a question of who he was. Did a white person know him? If so, he goes free. If not, they shoot him along with the other boys and string him up in a tree along the main highway. I didn’t see any dead bodies in trees. By then Daddy was adamant that Mother and I stay inside the gates.

I told the captain I knew him from when he was little, that his employer was an old friend of my father’s. That boy was not stupid. He knew the name Stites would have more pull with the Cuban officers than Lederer or any other American in Nicaro. They let him go.

Despite the new laws and curfews in Preston after the fire, mill equipment kept getting damaged and stolen anyway. The rebels took tractors, and put sugar in the gas tanks of Daddy’s Buick limousines. They raided his private freezers at the almacén. Daddy insisted on butchering his own meat, and he had the butchers down there wrap everything in white paper and label and stack them according to cut. The rebels left us not so much as a bag of gizzards. Maybe we have Del to thank for that. I didn’t care about steak, but I hated to see my father in a rage. It got worse in the summer of that year, when someone tossed a Molotov cocktail into Daddy’s Pullman car. There was nothing left but a charred shell. I went in there a few days after the fire. What a terrible thing, the velvet club chairs and couches just springs, like skeletons.

I always thought of the Pullman car as Panda’s, never mind that they kept it locked after she installed herself in there and got grubby fingerprints on everything. She cut swatches out of the velvet curtains with scissors, and all the drapes had to be replaced because they didn’t have any more of the old fabric. The Allains had to pay for the damage, but no one was angry at Panda. How can you be, at a serious little girl with a birthmark that made her look as if someone had slung a glass of red wine in her face? Mr. Flamm took it out of Rudy’s paycheck a little at a time. The company was like that. Informal. They treated people as people, and families as families. If the workers had a beef with us, they were supposed to go to a Cuban guy first. His job was to try to settle things off the record, Cuban to Cuban. If a worker was causing trouble, stealing or drinking too much cane brandy on his break, this same Cuban had a word with him. A lot of the workers drank on their shift breaks instead of acting sensibly and eating a square meal. They made liquor from the syrup that was dumped after the last stage of centrifuging. “La miel final” it’s called — the final honey — and it has absolutely no taste.