Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

When the fellows from Preston and Nicaro were kidnapped a few months later — in the summer of that year, 1958—the rebels invited a photojournalist from Life to go up to the Sierra Maestra and visit their camp. From the magazine pictures it looked like those guys were having one hell of a party up there, kidnappers and hostages drinking rum and smoking cigars, goofing off and lying around barefoot in hammocks. Mr. Lederer from Nicaro posed with a rebel’s hip holster, a drawn gun, and the caption said the Cubans had nicknamed him “Desperado.” What sort of kidnapping is that? The rebels managed to look like real heroes — romantic-type revolutionaries — right there in the pages of Life magazine. It would have been quite a scandal that they had an American boy on their side. And not just any boy, but a poster child for American “imperialismo”—Delmore Stites, son of Malcolm Stites, manager of the United Fruit Company’s Cuba Division.

I fiddled with the radio set and finally got Rebelde. It sounded like they’d closed down the highway east of Camagüey. They had a reputation for overstating their advances, and I didn’t really believe it. I heard the parlor door open and quickly switched off the broadcast. A man covered with soot was standing in the doorway. He looked like a chimney sweep, charred from head to toe. The hair on his head was burned off in patches. It was Daddy. His eyebrows were gone. So was his mustache. He had a banged-up gas can in his hand, a green and yellow company can like the ones in Rudy’s machine shop. He stood there and didn’t say a word, just tossed the gas can on the parlor floor. It bounced on the wood, empty. Daddy never wore anything but the white ducks. He was the picture of a United Fruit man, tall and intimidating in his perfectly pressed suit. And here he was, his white pants filthy, jacket gone. Wearing his pajama shirt, the sleeves rolled up, burned patches on his hands and arms that were the color of raw steak.

The dented gas can lay on the parlor floor, its cap missing. Daddy stood over it in his burned, soot-smeared clothes. He looked too dirty to sit down on his own furniture.

“Found this out there in the fields,” he said.

I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to respond or keep quiet. I knew what it meant. Someone set the fire. If the cane operation was anybody’s, it was Daddy’s. The idea that people would want to destroy it, it was like they wanted to destroy him. And us.

“It’s disgusting what these people are willing to do.” He started coughing. “Those son of a bitches.” His voice was almost gone from the smoke. “Those goddamn son of a bitches. This is what they call negotiating ?”

Daddy sat down in the chair across from me and put his head in his hands.

“They say they want to do business, work out a deal. And the next thing you know, they’re trying to burn us to the ground.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but Daddy had been sending messages up into the mountains, trying to negotiate with Raúl. By that point, the American managers in Oriente saw the writing on the wall and everybody was scrambling to keep the door open with the rebels, hoping to keep their operations running, their sweetheart deals and tax-free status, in case the rebels were suddenly the new government. Daddy was still dealing with Batista, of course — he was the president — but Batista had lost control of Oriente. That was a fact, but people in Havana, Ambassador Smith, and Batista’s army generals — these guys were in denial. So Daddy had taken it upon himself to get a line of communication going. I’m sure he was trying to get Del back as well. The problem was that Del didn’t want to come home.

“We had a deal,” Daddy said, “and the deal was, I work with them and they leave us alone. I sent a letter up there to Raúl Castro. They’ve got it in writing. And they turn around and attack us.”

My father had never confided in me about these sorts of things. Work was work, and he hung it up at the door; that was his rule.

“I personally promised this faggot Raúl that I’d get Dulles on the horn and stop the arms shipments. And I did — I held up my end of the bargain — and this is what I get: a bunch of natives running out of the hills and starting fires.”

The gray area marked “owned by others” on the map in Daddy’s office was a decent-sized plantation near Birán, fifteen miles southwest of us. It belonged to Don Ángel Castro, Fidel and Raúl’s father. He had acquired a lot of property down there for some unusual reason. I don’t know how he did it — moving fence lines, probably. He sold his cane to us, but he wouldn’t sell the land. Everybody knew the family. The kids, especially Raúl and Fidel, would lurk down in Mayarí, at the pool halls and the cockfights, when they were visiting from Havana, where they all went off to school. Later, Fidel said that when they were growing up they weren’t allowed into Preston, or invited to any of our social functions or permitted to use our beaches. But they were not employees of the United Fruit Company, and it was all private property, every last bit of it. And even if they had been employees, Cubans weren’t allowed certain places, like the Pan-American Club. But they wouldn’t have wanted to go to our club. Everybody kept to themselves. American with American. Cuban with Cuban. Jamaican with Jamaican. I remember thinking Raúl was a fruity type. People said he was like that. You know what I mean. A maricón. And they said he had a Chinese mother — he was Oriental-looking, and people were suspicious about that. I don’t know if there was more to it than just gossip. Fidel’s mother was the old man’s maid — Lina — she had a withered arm from polio. Del and I used to go hunting up in Birán, guinea hens and blue pigeons, and we’d see Don Ángel sitting on the porch in his guayabera, a big cigar in his mouth. We always stopped and said hello. The first time he invited us up for a glass of water, I couldn’t help staring at Lina’s withered arm, fascinated the way boys are. That place was in true guajiro style, the house up on stilts, with chickens and goats running around underneath it.

Months before the fire started, Daddy had begun to suspect that some of the cane cutters were rebel sympathizers. He had Rev. Crim reporting on the workers. And you might call it racist, especially nowadays, but it was reasonable to assume that anybody black — whether they were Cuban, Haitian, Jamaican — was trouble. Two months before the fire was set, one of the cane cutters had gone into Mr. Flamm’s office to see him. He wanted chits so he could draw off his pay and get credit at the almacén. But he’d already overdrawn what he would make for the whole cutting season. Some of these guys were foolish about that. They’d get chits to buy appliances at the company store and turn around and sell them in Mayarí for a quarter of what they were worth, just to have the money. Spend it on rotgut or lottery tickets. By the time payday rolled around they had nothing coming. They were working like dogs for no pay, just to get out of debt with the company. This cane cutter and Mr. Flamm had an argument. Mr. Flamm wouldn’t give him any store credit and tried to show him the books and explain why, but the guy wasn’t having any of it. What a shame. There is no reason to bring a machete into company headquarters. Mr. Flamm was a little teeny man in his wire-framed glasses. If only somebody had stopped the guy before he went in carrying that machete. After that, Hatch said no blacks in the offices. Mr. Flamm bled to death right there in the accounting office. That’s not politics, it’s mental illness. There were lots of cane cutters, thousands of them, and as I said, they barely had names. They came over on boats from Kingston and lived in these hovels. The one who killed Mr. Flamm ran off. I don’t know if they ever caught him.