Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

Castro asked if a Señor Suarez was in the crowd, and if so, would he please step forward. A delicate-looking man in spectacles moved toward the front, people making room for him to pass.

Señor Suarez, Castro explained, had been left in charge by the Americans. For the first time in history a Cuban would be running the mill. For the first time in history, La United would pay their taxes. It was almost crushing season, and they would have a glorious harvest.

“This revolution,” Castro said, “is for the cane cutters. It’s time for them to take their cut. And for Cuba to take hers.”

He said the revolution was beginning, but that it wouldn’t be an easy process, that it was a road full of danger.

“So many times now,” he said, “our revolution has been betrayed. In 1898, when the Americans invited themselves to rape our Cuba like a waterfront whore. Disposable, syphilitic, and worthy only of contempt. In 1952, when Batista betrayed the people. Again and again, those who claimed purity of heart turned out to be thieves and riffraff. For the first time in four centuries, this republic will be free. For the first time ever, it will be true to its revolution. Fatherland or death: it is our choice.”

Despite the romantic tone, La Mazière appreciated Castro’s obvious love for revolution as La Mazière himself loved it, purely, and for its own sake. True revolution was attitude and passion, not ideas and ideology, something Castro seemed to understand well. It was an epic of methods, not aims. Aims would come later, but what form they’d take was anyone’s guess. In his radio speeches, Castro had spoken repeatedly about a New Man, who didn’t fit into the old commonplace sloth of bourgeois democracy. He talked about a classless and authentic society, true to its cultural heritage, true to its heroes, in which virility, not privilege, was revered. He told his audiences they were the true elite, the unshaven, the unwashed, whose spirit is forged in action. The elite, he said, is not the man who uses the correct dinner fork. The elite is the man who knows how to eat with his hands.

Castro’s words gave off faint echoes, La Mazière thought, of Drieu and Brasillach, minus certain more drastic elements. Not that Castro’s vision was the same as Drieu’s or Brasillach’s. But his idealism, like theirs, was radically unstable, as was all idealism.

There was an impromptu party after Castro’s speech, in a rounded building with enormous windows that jutted over the bay like an ocean liner. Behind an elegant mahogany bar were signs in English describing variously flavored daiquiris — pineapple, coco, and lemon-lime.

In the center of the club’s tiled dance floor there was a charred cavity, and another hole in the hallway where the bathrooms were located, shattered mirror fragments underfoot. The place had been bombed but not wrecked. The jukebox still worked, and music blared from it, a deluxe-model Wurlitzer stocked exclusively with Cuban songs — a detail of the place that La Mazière found oddly touching. He read it as some shred of desire, on the part of these now absent Americans, to assimilate, to claim that the Cuban music was as much theirs as it was anyone’s, because they loved it as much as anyone else loved it. Even if a love that derived from proprietary was a kind of profound ignorance, it touched him all the same. The Americans had clearly loved the foliage, the daiquiris, the Cuban music. He could feel it in their empty town, the ghostly imprint of their naive and imperialist love.

Soldiers and locals, mill workers and cane cutters and their children all danced, careful not to step in the charred hole in the center of the tiled dance floor. They did the mambo, the pachanga, the cha-cha-cha, or rather “cha-cha,” as La Mazière had learned this Cuban dance was properly called, the third “cha” one more American excess.

People went behind the bar and made themselves drinks, American whiskeys and English gins. La Mazière, too, helped himself to the American whiskey. Having gone without such luxuries for several months now, his constitution was almost virgin to its eighty-proof. The warmth spread quickly through him, his cells catching fire in a manner that was entirely pleasant.

The rebels would be going to Santiago to pay their respects to the Black Virgin, then onward, in a slow and meritorious caravan to Havana. Batista had fled two days before, on New Year’s Eve, and overnight the revolution had come to fruition. The rebels were the state as they danced in an abandoned American social club, drinking English gin and doing the mambo, careful not to step in the dance floor crater.

La Mazière began to feel himself receding from the scene, as if he were not a full participant in these festivities, a mind that was not part of their collective fabric, their revelry, but attached to something outside it.

He stepped onto the club’s veranda and gazed at the endless blue water. Nipe, the largest bay in Cuba, so integral to the weapons shipments he’d arranged. There were smaller fishing boats and pleasure craft tied along the dock, and larger vessels, a barge and a United Fruit Company freighter anchored offshore. What was beyond the blue? The Bahamas, he guessed, to the north. And south and east, around the crenellated corner of the island, Hispaniola. Duvalier and his humility. Trujillo and his makeup.

The rebels were the state, and overnight. A transition that was not unlike a man waking up to discover he’d somehow married his mistress. A gesture that would surely kill the allure of romance, of luminous desire, in the very fact of its guarantee. Like killing the allure of a new government, a new power structure, in the very fact of its installment. He gazed at the watery horizon, indulging in a childlike wonder at the simple fact that there were unseen worlds beyond the blue. “The sea! The sea!” the soldiers cried out. He felt an old familiar hunger beginning to announce itself, the desire to dissolve back into civilian life and witness the rest of this thing, the completion of revolution’s arc, from a cozily anonymous vantage.

He knew this part of the equation, the end of an arc, the waking up, the exorcism. Purges, kangaroo courts, justice. Lots of justice, for which the rebels would wish they’d saved those sky-aimed victory bullets.

He slipped out and headed toward a destroyed railcar sitting on a pair of tracks beyond the sugar mill. He walked along the tracks, which cut through an ocean of silver-green sugarcane, and eventually reached the main highway. He was in remote territory, but someone would have to come down the road sooner or later. Perhaps an American family who hadn’t left in the mass exodus, optimists pressing their luck. He could claim he’d been a hostage in the mountains, kidnapped along with one of the groups that Raúl had held for several weeks. He’d explain that he was a Frenchman, wanting only to return to Paris.

He had little luck. The rebels had sealed the eastern half of the island, and almost no one had fuel. The few who did were not stopping. He walked until well after dark, and spent the night in a cane field.

Late the next morning, he was drudging along the side of the highway, the sun burning a hole in his back, when a car stopped — a roomy, brand-new Buick sedan, a wealthy Cuban family inside. They gave him passage all the way to Havana and asked no questions, which he found remarkable in its gentility, its politeness.

The journey was twenty hours, with lengthy delays at checkpoints manned by rebels glowering officiously, despite their rusted weapons and mismatched uniforms. One particularly insolent young soldier had been eating an enormous piece of bread, crumbs tumbling down the front of his shirt as he demanded the driver’s identification and an explanation of their “movements.”