Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

I dialed the number for Charmaine Mackey of Carlsbad, New Mexico.

The phone rang once, and a woman answered. I could feel the particular muffled quiet of a very old person’s home.

I say I’m hoping to reach a Mrs. Mackey, formerly of Nicaro, Cuba.

“Yes, dear,” she says. “How can I help you?”

In a way I envy Del for not wanting any of this stuff. My brother moves through life and doesn’t look back, drawn intensely into one thing, then another, each thing canceling out what came before it.

The wife he has now, it almost seems an indiscretion that anyone fathom Del pining for a person like Tee-Tee Allain. Del’s wife wouldn’t understand that girls like Tee-Tee exist, with her accidental charm, an accidental femininity, a despite-everything sexiness, dirty legs, wolf’s eyes, stringy hair, and possibly crazy. Del’s wife is the antidote, a trophy, very artificial. She’s what he was supposed to want. I doubt he wants it, and I’d guess that is partly the point.

When Del turned up in Le Cap in early 1959, he’d seen Raúl Castro “execute,” or so they were calling it — more than a hundred men in Santiago. Del was ordered to bulldoze the bodies into a mass grave, and I believe that’s when my brother’s career as a “barbudo” came to an end. He told Mother he’d seen body parts floating in he Levisa River that December just before he disappeared, peasants that the Rural Guard had chopped up and dumped in our river. Then he was ordered to dump people into a mass grave. Violence got him in and violence pushed him out.

A year after the revolution he was very anti-Castro, living in Miami and working with various parties to “get the place back,” he said. Of course, that world turned out to be just as violent as Raúl’s. Lito Gonzalez was involved in these movements to overthrow Castro, a Miami big shot. He went to start his Cadillac one morning in 1975 and blew himself to bits. There was a lot of infighting with those guys, a lot of disputes. I came across Lito Gonzalez’s grave in Woodlawn Cemetery down in Miami. I was taking Rev. Crim’s widow to put flowers on her husband’s headstone. After we left Cuba Daddy remained close with Rev. Crim, who had conducted Methodist services in Preston and run the agricultural school. The dictator Machado is buried in that cemetery. So is the president before Batista, Carlos Prio. Prio blew his brains out. People said it was financial troubles. Deke and Dolly Havelin are buried there. They share a giant black marble mausoleum with the inscription, “Cubanos de corazón.” Pretty sappy, but so was poor Deke, who’d given up his citizenship and couldn’t return to the States, not until his relatives shipped him back to be buried in Florida. The family mausoleum at Colón Cemetery in Havana, where Deke had wanted to be laid to rest, was engulfed in ficus roots, its Lalique windows smashed and anything removable taken. Deke and Dolly had ended up living in the Dominican Republic. They were in São Paulo for less than a month, Deke relishing his grand appointment as a Cuban diplomat, before Batista fled the island and the curtain came down. The minute he flees, you’re not ambassador anymore.

After the Bay of Pigs disaster, Del gave up agitating and got into weight lifting. He worked out with Steve Reeves on Muscle Beach. Now it’s real estate. Del has done very well for himself. He lives on Marco Island, where the money is.

Feelings run high. Just sit at the Teresita for one lunch rush and you’ll get the drift. People who feel that everything was stolen from them, and just because it’s been almost fifty years now doesn’t mean they have forgotten. They haven’t. Nor have the companies. A company is like a person in that it has a memory, its own institutional memory. A company can wait and anticipate with more patience than a person. There are pending claims against the Cuban government that the Cubans ignore. Mining concerns like the old Nicaro Nickel Company keep meticulous account of what they lost. United Fruit became United Brands became Chiquita. CEOs came and went. The claim lives on, in a black binder somewhere at the Justice Department—$350 million at this point, with inflation. After every last person who worked for United Fruit is long dead and gone, still, the company will fight to get its assets back.

An assistant in Daddy’s office, Mr. Suarez, ended up overseeing cane crushing and processing after we left for Le Cap. He was ambitious, and when they nationalized they made him administrador, which is what the Cubans call manager. Suarez was bright, and he got the whole operation up and working. When they were short on fuel, he had them running the mill on bagasse, which is cane trash. Suarez was competent, and yet Daddy said that up until 1963 he got a phone call every afternoon after Suarez did his rounds. He called Daddy every day, to run the numbers and report on what was happening. At a mill that was owned by the Cuban government! The company built the mill and the town and the culture around it. You extract the culture, and there’s no purpose to the operation, no overseer, no witness. For whom is the sugar ground? Suarez couldn’t accept that it was no longer ground for us.

Daddy died in 1964. I honestly think he died of a broken heart. You don’t transfer someone to bananas or pineapples, just throw away immense knowledge and experience, when they’ve spent their entire adult life managing a sugar operation. He retired early and became very depressed. I went to military school in Gainesville, Georgia. It was September when I enrolled, and I cried myself to sleep every night because the leaves were falling off the trees. I’d never seen anything so terrible.

Some people say Hemingway killed himself because he was devastated that he wouldn’t be able to go to Cuba anymore, after the U.S. travel ban. His first suicide attempt was the day Kennedy announced the Bay of Pigs on television. Maybe it’s worthless to wonder why someone does such a thing, but I can believe that theory. It wrecked a lot of lives to seal the place off.

“Yes, dear,” Mrs. Mackey said. “How can I help you?”

I explained who I was, slightly mortified for disturbing this ancient woman. She said she remembered me, but I don’t think she did. I think she was being polite. Of course she remembered Mother and Daddy. We talked about the evacuation, where they’d gone from Guantánamo. She said her husband had wanted to stay in Nicaro, but Lito Gonzalez threatened to kill him if he didn’t leave. I wondered if she had an active imagination, though a lot of people thought Gonzalez was trouble. She laughed about it, the way old people are able to laugh about serious things because they happened so long ago.

She told me she and her husband divorced just after they returned from Cuba. I said I was sorry to hear it and she said don’t be, that it was for the best. He’d always made her nervous, she said, and he couldn’t stand nervous women. She’d remarried, a gentleman from Puerto Rico, and they had a daughter together. I asked her about Phillip, curious to hear where he lived, what kind of work he did.

“Phillip has been dead for eight years now,” she said.

I couldn’t believe it. I’d always had this vague idea that someday I would get in touch with Phillip Mackey and ask about him and Del and their involvement with the rebels, what Phillip thought of the revolution, Castro, everything. But it was too late. I called too late.

Now, that is an irony: Del lives in Collier County, two and half hours away. I would travel around the world to get fifteen minutes with my wife, with Mother. But I can’t ask a living person to explain something to me.

It had never crossed my mind that Phillip Mackey would be dead, that Charmaine Mackey would be alive and tell me this. She said Phillip had been living in Paraguay — some of the people from Nicaro and Preston were serial expat types. I guess Phillip went that way, too. He got sick and tried to work through it, whatever that means. It doesn’t really matter how he died. The Puerto Rican husband was gone as well, she said. The men always go first. I asked if anyone looked after her. She said no, that she had to take care of their daughter, who was handicapped. This is a woman who must be in her late eighties. Calling her felt like a real intrusion, asking her about her life from fifty years ago, and making her talk about the death of her son. But before we got off the phone she said she was glad I called and she hoped I’d call again. I never did. It’s been three years now. I don’t know if she’s still alive.