Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

Their problems with us, ours with them — the idea was to get things straightened out native to native. It was a very old-fashioned way of doing things.

The Rural Guard had a different philosophy. Jesús Sosa Blanco, the captain, had been let out of prison by Batista. Sosa Blanco had killed his wife, his mother-in-law, and his sister-in-law. Batista released rapists and murderers — anyone who’d enlist went free. The Rural Guard was like a local, domestic version of the French Foreign Legion, who were good enough to do dirty work in the colonies, but not to be free citizens of France. At the end, when Batista sneaked off the island, in the middle of the night, resigned finally to the fact that he’d lost and the revolution was imminent, was there space for Captain Sosa Blanco, murderer and ex-con, on the DC-4? Of course not. He was tried in the Sports Palace, where Daddy took me to see Sugar Ray Robinson fight that Christmas. Thousands of people watched from the stands as a firing squad executed him. I watched it on CBS.

Revolutions start with fires. That’s how it was in Haiti in the 1790s. In Cuba in 1844 they had La Escalera, when the slaves burned some of the larger Spanish cane plantations in Oriente. The slaves who led these revolts were called “kings” and “queens,” and they gave the signals to torch. When the rebellion was finally quashed, the Spanish executed not just its “royal” leaders but also thousands of slaves, many of them probably innocent. Plantation owners tied the slaves to ladders — that’s “la escalera”—and whipped them to death. Of course, no one was whipped to death in Cuba in the 1950s, but what Daddy had to deal with wasn’t all that different, except there weren’t any kings and queens — only “comrades”—and it wasn’t Daddy who dealt out punishments. This is a modern state, and they had secret police — the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar, or SIM — and the Rural Guard, led by Captain Sosa Blanco. But with a history of tumult and revolts, certain ideas, certain lessons, silt in — like the belief that it’s necessary to crush these things before they get out of hand. And that the only effective way is with violence.

It was Sosa Blanco’s idea that every native must have his hands waxed with paraffin. If the wax showed traces of nitrate, that person had fired a gun. They didn’t bother arresting people. They shot them on the spot, or worse. On the roadside between Preston and Mayarí, Sosa Blanco burned five people alive, four men and a woman who all had nitrate on their hands. He hung them from trees and started a bonfire underneath like he was roasting five New Year’s pigs. I wasn’t supposed to know about that, but Hatch told Curtis, and Curtis told me. The thing is, anyone who works on a farm and handles fertilizer is going to have nitrate on his hands.

I started listening to the rebels’ clandestine broadcast, Radio Rebelde, every night. We couldn’t get any of the regular news. Our paper, the Havana Post, was mostly inked out in black. The only things they left for us to read were recipes for pineapple upside-down cake, want ads for light-skinned domestics, and silly columns about people like Deke and Dolly hosting charity balls. The censorship started to make the Americans uncomfortable, and I think it’s the main reason why Batista got blackballed from the Yacht Club that spring. Daddy went to Havana for the vote. Who knows what else Daddy did in Havana? You’d think one or two would vote for the president, but it was all blackballs. Batista was a mulatto. Some people said he was an achinado, which is part Chinese. Of course, color played a part in his rejection from the club.

Clavelito was still doing his program, but I didn’t hear his voice coming from the bohios when I rode my bike down there. Everyone was tuned into Rebelde to learn what was happening. Then the rebels put Violeta Casal on the air, so you got news and you got Violeta Casal.

Violeta Casal was a well-known actress who appeared in the print and television commercials for Pompeii laundry flakes. When I heard her silky voice reading the news reports over the radio, I had an image in my mind of the soap flakes model, a jiggly girl with dimples and dark, wavy hair. I thought about her a lot, and forgot all about Elisia Arnaz.

Violeta Casal announced that Fidel had ordered his own family’s cane burned first because they, too, were exploitative landowners. I guess you can’t call him a hypocrite. I don’t think it was first, but they really did burn Ángel Castro’s cane fields. Fidel’s mother, Lina, was furious. The old man had died the year before. Daddy had gone to his service, at the church in Banes where Fidel married the Diaz-Hart girl.

Violeta Casal talked about miracles, but they were different from Clavelito’s miracles, which involved winning the lottery, or cures for marital troubles, or hernias, or the chronic lateness that Clavelito said a lot of people suffered from. Violeta Casal declared that there were miraculous signs the rebels were triumphing. When the El Cobre copper mine above the city of Santiago was bombed, the only thing that wasn’t damaged was the Black Virgin in El Cobre church. Its glass case was not even cracked, while everything around it was rubble. Violeta Casal said the Black Virgin was guiding the struggle and would save the Cubans from Batista’s corruption the way she saved three miners in 1628. A ferocious storm had come in while the miners were out fishing, and their boat capsized in Nipe Bay. That’s our bay. They were drowning when the Black Virgin came toward them on a block of wood. The miners grabbed on to the wood and floated to safety. The Cubans made her the patron saint of the island. They carried her to Santiago on the old horse trail that cuts through Ángel Castro’s property. Blacks went to El Cobre to pray to the Black Virgin for healthy babies. Pardos, or lighter-skinned Cubans, prayed to the whitest saint they could find, hoping for light-skinned babies.

For a long time, we heard nothing from Del. Daddy said it was a family issue, and not to be discussed with the other Americans. This was especially hard for Mother, having to pretend that everything was fine when her son had disappeared. Everyone knew about it anyway. Everly heard through the houseboy. You got the feeling that all the blacks had some inside key to what was happening. I started to wonder if Annie knew. But I doubt that she did. She was practically a part of our family.

A few weeks after the cane fire, a letter finally arrived from Del. This was in March of 1958. Del had been gone for three months, since Christmas. That was the moment when a person seemed like a stranger to me. Daddy with a whore is still Daddy. But Del’s litany, I just couldn’t attach his voice to it. He said the cane fire hadn’t caused any more damage than the phosphorus that Batista’s American-built bombers had dropped on the guajiros in the Sierra Cristal — humble people, he wrote, who were honest and working their own land, not land that rightfully belonged to someone else. He said he hoped Daddy was contemplating his association with tyrants and criminals, and that we should all be thinking about what justice meant.

The only part that seemed like the old Del was the postscript: “As you both know, I hate to write letters. So I dictated this.”

A woman’s voice, American, echoed up to her window, cutting through a steady drumming of rain.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” the woman shrieked, plaintive and drunk. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Rachel K had spread the postcards out on the bed. Every few months one turned up in her mailbox. Greetings from the banks of the Tagus. Greetings from the banks of the Neva. Greetings from the banks of the Seine, they announced. But it was always the same image: a lithograph of a woman reclining on an ottoman piled with cushions, a gauzy band of fabric draped across her hips so she wasn’t completely nude.