Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

I’m looking through Mother’s United Fruit ledger. It’s so fragile that each page I turn, the paper tears and starts to unglue from the binding. There are photographs, pressed flowers, letters, and telegrams. There’s a picture of me in one of the school plays. I hated that play. I was a plum pudding. Mother made me do it.

Here’s a program from the Cabaret Tokio, where Xavier Cugat used to perform. “Air-conditioned,” “national and international Stars”—they capitalized the S for some reason — et cetera. The telephone number is on the bottom of the program:

B-4544

Not something you can call. But what if you could?

People say Batista had a gold telephone, fourteen-carat, a gift from American Telephone & Telegraph — another company that has a giant lawsuit pending against Cuba. Maybe it’s true about the gold phone, but people like to caricature guys like Batista, which makes them that much harder to see. Daddy kept his distance, regarded him as a thuggish sort, but he had a certain respect. Batista was not another peón, an animal that talked, a cartoon with a solid gold telephone. He was of mixed race and from very poor people — a class lower than the lowest class. He’d worked his way up to president. You have to allow people their contradictions, give them what they’re due.

Del once said that Mother’s sympathy for people, without any sympathy for what caused their circumstances, was not real sympathy but sentimentality.

Perhaps it’s true. The fact is we went down there and we took. But I don’t think it was Mother’s responsibility to change that fact, or anything else. I don’t think her sentimentality was any kind of crime.

Hilton Hardy became mayor of Preston. Castro renamed our town “Guatemala,” but I can’t imagine anyone who remembers it as Preston saying “Guatemala.” That is incredible — our chauffeur, mayor of Preston! But that’s communism. Ho Chi Minh started out as a fry cook at the Ritz.

I fish in the Caribbean all the time. I have a boat. I go to the Bahamas. I could easily sail clear into Preston Harbor, go and knock on the door of my very own house. But I never have. I understand that the town is terribly run-down, and I don’t want to see that.

Everly Lederer and her sisters are the only ones who have gone back, as far as I know. She went to Preston and took photos and showed them to Rev. Crim’s widow, who told me about it. I have Everly’s phone number. Mrs. Crim gave it to me. But I haven’t called her. Mrs. Crim said the photos were awful to look at. She said our house is a school and the Crims’ house has about fifteen families jammed into it. Mrs. Crim said Everly told her that she and her two sisters were hoping to find their old houseboy. I wonder if it was that curious boy who’d worked for Mr. Bloussé. Apparently they found this fellow living in Levisa — Castro’s “revolution showcase.” The Rural Guard had burned Levisa flat, and Castro rebuilt it straight away and gave all the blacks real houses, with poured-concrete foundations and indoor plumbing. Mrs. Crim said Everly told her she wires the houseboy money every month, sends it to Mayarí, and the houseboy takes the bus down there to get it. She said Everly talked about this houseboy as if he were practically a blood relative. She goes back there every year to see him, and stays with him and his wife. At some point I’m going to call her. I’d like to hear about Preston, at least I think I would. Part of me isn’t sure if it’s the same place, now that we’re not there, the company isn’t there. I’ll have to be good and ready when I call her. Mrs. Crim said she had the uncomfortable feeling that Everly was a sympathizer to communism. My thought was maybe she’s just a sympathizer period, like Mother.

My phone is ringing again. Someone keeps calling and hanging up without leaving a message. It’s a quarter to eleven. Soon I’ll go down to the Teresita. It might be Red McGreevy calling, but I’ll see him at lunch. The Teresita is what you call a joint, and all my buddies eat there. Red is old-fashioned like me, makes a call, and if he gets a recording puts the phone quietly back on the cradle instead of speaking into the machine. Too old to adjust to the new ways. He and I and some other guys are going hunting this weekend. They wanted to hunt just pheasant, but I insisted we hunt geese as well. If you hunt only pheasant you’re done at nine in the morning and end up in the lodge drinking brandy the rest of the day.

Eventually the state went after Clavelito. They forced him not to sell any more mail-order merchandise, magic powders, and special equipment. Right before we left Preston, they took him off the air completely.

There were articles about it in the papers, housewives, his main fan base, up in arms. He was being charged with fraud, and part of the reason was those special phones for calling the dead. “Selling faulty equipment” was one of the charges.

It seems silly to ban such a thing, much less prosecute someone for selling them.

Anyone who buys a psychic telephone doesn’t really believe it’s going to work. That all you need is $19.99. Buy the machine. Take it home. Plug it in. Dial a number and hear the living voice of someone dead and vanished. People buy things for other reasons. They weren’t born yesterday. They don’t need the law to tell them the equipment is faulty.

Let people learn for themselves:

You don’t call the dead.

The dead call you.

There it was on the globe, a dashed line of darker blue on the lighter blue Atlantic. Words in faint italic script: Tropic of Cancer. She had crossed it more than once, but still she pictured daisy chains of seaweed stretching across the water toward a distant horizon.

And still there was the paradox of zones and borders on a surface that was fluid, that could float a bottle containing a message halfway around the world. During his exile at Guernsey, where the granite cliffs were shaped like kings, a monster, a nun’s habit, letters reached the author addressed simply “Victor Hugo, Océan.” Had the woman from Guernsey really invited the man from Dakar to dinner? It seemed unlikely for 1952. There was a detail a child might overlook: the man from Dakar would be black.

This time she crossed the Tropic of Cancer in an airplane. Her sister brought the scrapbook, but the flight from Miami was so short they barely had time to look through it. “Prime rib, Harvard beets, whipped potatoes, a cold buffet with pineapple ring, and for dessert, rum raisin ice cream from El Louvre in Havana — the Duke of Windsor’s favorite!” Their dinner menu from the SS Florida . “We didn’t stay at the Lincoln Hotel,” the youngest said, the flames of the Regla oil refinery burning in the distance as their taxi sped along the Malecón. “It was the Sevilla, the Graham Greene place with the Moorish tiles.” On the Air Cubana connection from Havana to Santiago, a stewardess passed out hard candies and paper cups of water. The seat belt signs were in Cyrillic.

It was 1999. They stayed at the Rancho Club Motel in Santiago, where their father had attended Raúl Castro and Vilma Espín’s wedding reception a month after the revolution. “I promised I would attend, and I am keeping my word,” he’d told Marjorie Lederer, though of course he was thrilled to attend. He returned from Cuba ecstatic, humming Danzón melodies. A marvelous, earthy affair, he said. He and Mr. Billings flew down together, George Lederer toting a Bundt cake pan despite his doubts that it was an appropriate wedding gift for revolutionaries. “It’s cast aluminum, ” Marjorie Lederer said. “It’s a very good Bundt cake pan.” Everly was given the exact same model of cake pan when she married. She and Raúl shared kitchen equipment, a pan she never used and was sure he hadn’t, either.