Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

The company guys who wanted to court Mr. Bloussé’s daughters came to our house to meet with Mr. Bloussé. There were three of them, and they showed up with their hair combed flat, in dinner jackets, smelling of Vitalis. They were bachelors, bored and lonely. They had good pay, no expenses, free housing; everything was provided by the company. But there was no place to go, nothing to spend the money on, and they couldn’t date the Cuban girls. At least not the upper-class, light-skinned girls. The Cubans didn’t allow it: Americans were mongrels as far as they were concerned. We didn’t have the right blood. Rich Cubans, the planters and politicians, they sent their children to be educated in Europe — Paris or Madrid — not the United States. They wanted their daughters to marry Spanish aristocrats, not some rube from Kansas. If these fellows did manage to get a date with a Cuban girl, they were expected to sit on the porch with her mother, her sister, her grandmother — a stern dueña in a black lace shawl, policing the situation. In Oriente, you never went out with a young Cuban girl alone. But these guys weren’t used to any of that, so they cut corners. Daddy said he lost a lot of good people, really fine employees, because of the trouble they got themselves into with Cuban women. Daddy was sensitive about those things. We may have owned the land, but Daddy had to deal with Cubans to keep things running smoothly with Batista, the Rural Guard, these sorts of Latin factotums, and it was better to fire an employee than to offend anyone. Daddy made it a policy to send fat old Jamaican women to work in bachelors’ homes. The younger the employee, the fatter and older and uglier the maid. No young, pretty servants for those guys. Daddy himself always had a male secretary. He worked late hours, and said he didn’t want his secretary leaving to go fix dinner for her family.

Mr. Bloussé came back to Preston and he brought his wife and the three daughters. They stayed at the company hotel down by the docks — like everything else in town, I’m sure it’s fallen into an awful state at this point. I’ve seen pictures and it’s terrible how they haven’t taken care of those places. They cram ten families in each house and let the buildings rot, no paint, no maintenance. It was a very elegant hotel, with dark red walls and mahogany furniture. Mr. Bloussé and his wife and daughters checked in and then came to our house for dinner. When they arrived, Mother’s mouth nearly dropped to the floor. Mr. Bloussé’s wife was Haitian — she was black, and I mean black, and so were the daughters. Annie didn’t want to serve them. I think she felt it was an insult to have to wait on other blacks, and such dark ones, too. There are codes to these things. The bachelors who’d come over to impress Mr. Bloussé with their greased hair and Vitalis, they got wind of it and none of them showed up to meet the daughters. The courtships were called off. The guys all joked about it afterward, said Mr. Bloussé was a nigger-lover and a mud shark. But I never heard Daddy mention it. I knew he disapproved of race mixing. The Cubans did it sometimes, they dated black, and they called their girlfriends mi negrita. And the Chinamen married Cubans because they had to. There weren’t any Chinese women. Maybe that’s why people accused the Chinamen of being homosexuals. And why people accused Raúl Castro of it — because he looked part Chinese. We had two Chinamen at the house, one for the vegetable garden and one for the flowers. Daddy had a whole village of them, to work the centrifugals at the sugar mill. It was hot as Hades in that room. As the centrifugals stirred the boiling cane syrup, the last impurities bubbled up and the sugar crystals got spun out. The Chinamen wore little underwear like Speedo bathing suits as they worked. The Cubans refused to do that job because of the heat. Each Chinaman had a cup of salt and a bucket of water, and they wore the little Speedos because it was like 140 degrees in there. They would just sweat, sweat, sweat.

“As you can see,” Mr. Bloussé said to Daddy that night when we sat down to dinner, “I’m doing my part to blanchir the population.” He gestured to the wife and daughters. During dinner, Mr. Bloussé told a story about a ship where ophthalmia spread. Everyone on the ship, including the captain and his helmsman, caught it and went blind, and they plowed right into another steamer. Daddy laughed and seemed relaxed, as if he admired Mr. Bloussé as much as he had before we knew he had a colored family. I was a young boy and this was confusing to me, why something Daddy disapproved of was suddenly okay. I figured it had to do with Mr. Bloussé being French and exotic and debonair. Like maybe the very rich didn’t have to abide by the same rules as everybody else. Mother and Daddy didn’t even want me hugging Annie so tightly. Mother was a liberal, but not too liberal. Mother said Annie’s smell rubbed off on me — she’d sniff me to check. Annie did have a smell, sort of musky. I loved it. I can smell it right now. When I was little I let her hug me when they weren’t around. She squeezed me tight. It was a wonderful, safe feeling, my face buried in her apron so I could barely breathe. She called me muñequito, her little doll. I don’t remember if she had any children of her own. Maybe she did, but I think they lived in Mayarí. Annie lived with us. Once, in a taxicab here in Tampa, the driver was some type of black Caribbean and his cab smelled like Annie.

With no water to put out the fires, Daddy said we would have to wait for them to burn themselves out. The men kept on cutting breaks, putting down flame retardant along the access road, backburning, and we had to just hope for the best. At about five o’clock that evening, Rudy Allain came to our house. He was blackened from head to toe with cane ash. I couldn’t remember Rudy ever coming to our house before. Certainly not inside, as a guest. As I said, there was a pecking order in Preston, always someone to answer to. Daddy wasn’t Rudy’s boss. Rudy was a few notches down the chain. Rudy and his brother, Hatch, were different from us socially, you could say. Coarse people from Louisiana who knew how to handle workers. They didn’t live on La Avenida. Daddy had them in two brick houses down by the mill.

Daddy and Rudy sat in the kitchen, talking. Rudy told Daddy the rebels had drained our gasoline supply, and there was nothing in the pumps. They’d done it the previous night, just before they torched our fields. Rudy said whoever had done it must have had keys to the shop. Keys to the fuel pumps. Known where the valves for the irrigation lines were in order to cut off the water. Rudy said maybe an insider was helping them. Maybe an American, he said, and then pointed out again that it had to be someone with keys. Hilton kept all of Daddy’s company keys on hooks in the garage, a label on each set. I remembered hearing Hilton tell Daddy that he needed masters to make new copies, that some of the keys were missing. That was right after Del disappeared.

Daddy stood up from the table. “Goddamnit, Rudy. My son is gone, probably kidnapped by these lunatics. For all I know he’s lashed to a tree, eating bark, and you’re telling me he came down here and torched the town where he was born? Where both of my children were born?”

“I’m not saying he started the fire, Mr. Stites—”

“Then what the hell are you saying?”

“Nothing, sir. I’m sorry if I implied — I hope the boy is okay is all.”

Del was okay, and Daddy knew it. For starters, he hadn’t been kidnapped. He went gladly. He wasn’t on our side.

The fire burned late into the night. From our upstairs windows we could see a reddish glow, and smoke backlit by the glow. The rebels had blocked our train lines and the road into Preston. Daddy was putting in calls to Ambassador Smith, hoping he’d get us help from Guantánamo. Maybe they could send a firefighting vessel up the coast, one of those things that pumped ocean water. But then the town transformers had to be shut down because of fire danger, and we had no phone line. Mother, Daddy, and I sat around with hurricane lamps going. Mother tried to keep the mood light. She knew how to handle a crisis, and she and I played canasta. What else was there to do? There’s something relaxing about that game. Bastista played it obsessively. Some people say that’s why his government collapsed. The rebels were taking over, and meanwhile he was at the presidential palace playing canasta, his aides standing behind the other players, signaling discreetly what cards they held. Annie made us cold sandwiches and we ate those while we played. Daddy paced and cursed Smith — he’d been warning the ambassador that all hell was about to break loose, but Smith kept insisting that Fidel was just a ruffian in the hills. The ambassador was out of touch with what was happening in Oriente. He’d come recently to Santiago, and his reception was about as warm and friendly as what those Venezuelans gave Nixon a few months after the fire, in May of ’58. Rocks whistling through the air. When Smith arrived in Santiago, the Rural Guard had been cracking down as a warning to the rebels. They’d killed a few students, and people were livid. That was his last visit. I think he preferred the yacht club in Havana.