Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

A French adventurer, her mother had said, which didn’t explain why Ferdinand had spoken mostly German. He’d started his own film company in Havana, named it after Rachel K’s grandmother Irene, “Irene Fantoscope.” They had a scheme to advertise commercial messages on clouds floating over the city. It was either moronic or brilliant. Either way, it hadn’t worked. Ferdinand got syphilis and died. He left Irene with a small child — Rachel K’s mother — who must have had similar taste in men, because she, too, ended up alone and penniless with her own child, Rachel K.

Far down below, the sugarcane swished, turning green or silver according to the direction it was blown, like brushed velvet nap.

She’d been reluctant at first to go with the executive to Oriente. He’d always struck her as a person who was dangerous because he didn’t know which parts of him were rotten, or even that he harbored rot.

“All this belongs to us,” he said, as they flew low over the green cane fields. “Three hundred thousand acres.”

Maybe he wasn’t dangerous after all. He simply wanted a showgirl to marvel over his sugar empire.

He’d brought along a half-full bottle of whiskey and plenty of ice. They drank it, the executive shouting up to the pilot every so often with instructions, then pointing out this and that to Rachel K. The company sugar mill, the company town. The company “choo-choo trains,” he called them.

“You be a good girl and finish this up.” He poured more whiskey into her glass. The bottle was empty and they must have been drunk, but it was difficult to gauge drunkenness when she was sitting still, crammed into a tiny plane.

“We toss the empties,” he said, “to test the soil. The higher the bottle bounces, the richer the loam. That’s how we know what to buy. Don’t even have to bother landing.”

He insisted that she drop the empty whiskey bottle from the window of the plane. It was Dewar’s, she later remembered. Dewar’s White Label. She’d watched the clear glass bottle plunging down into the green. The executive claimed that it bounced, but she didn’t see anything. Just green.

They landed at company headquarters somewhere along the northern coast, a place called Preston. Damp heat closed in around her, and sweat rolled down the sides of her face. “Not used to it, are you?” he said, grinning. “Humid, humid, humid — it’s perfect for the cane.”

He pointed toward rows of large and ornate haciendas along the edge of a blue-green bay. “We live over there. She and the boys are gone for a couple days, shopping in Santiago.” He gripped Rachel K by the waist with both hands. “And I’m gone on hooky.” Without letting go, he told her, “I have to confess: I sometimes find myself wanting to stuff you in a footlocker.” And then he added, in a bewildered tone, “Why do I feel this way?” As if she might know the answer.

She pulled away and skipped down an alley of bananas, a pale-green canopy of long, floppy leaves, taller than she was and loaded with dank and heavy clusters of bananas.

She put her hand around the trunk of a banana plant and felt its cool pulse.

“They’re full of water,” the executive called after her, “pure water.”

At the airport in Havana where he landed his company plane, Stites — that was his name, she could never remember it and called him “you”—got her a taxi into town.

He put his hand on her head. “Look, I’m sad, too, that our little trip is over, but try not to pout.”

“Okay.” She assumed a pouty look and got in the taxi.

She went home and lay in the bath, relieved to be alone after two days of performing the executive’s idea of her, that they were having an “affair,” as he put it, that she cared about his sugarcane. After her bath, she painted on her fishnets. Using a sable cosmetic brush and a pot of liquid mascara, she drew lines that crossed at angles to make diamonds, her foot lodged on the windowsill of her kitchenette. This ritual took several hours to complete. Like prayer, it was a quiet, obliterative meditation that opened up an empty space in her thoughts.

President Prio showed up at the Cabaret Tokio that night.

“You’ve been gone,” he said. “Handsome missed you.”

Handsome was what she called him, a nickname, though Prio was not, in truth, so handsome. He was president and vain. They sat together in his private booth, decorated like a Roman grotto with panorama-print classical scenery, plaster figurines, and purple-leafed wandering Jew tumbling down the walls like ivy. Prio gave her an opal pendant and a silk dress with a secret pocket. She kissed his mustache and let him practice his speeches on her.

He rehearsed his grand civic plans, announcing he would build a new Havana aqueduct, schools for the children in the slums, and a botanical garden open to the public, with a special aviary for African birds. This was just talk. Mostly, Prio liked to have a good time. The press ridiculed him for his expensive tastes: caviar, Russian vodka, fourteen-carat toilet flush handles. Photos had been in the newspaper of him and his prime minister, Tony, jumping over the sofas in the Green Room of the president’s palace, in pursuit of young girls clad in short shorts. They were taken during one of Prio’s notorious “white” parties, plenty of cocaine for everyone. After the photos were leaked, Tony moved to Venezuela and started a construction firm. Prio went out only in dark sunglasses. His wife had black illusion veils sewn to the inside of all her pillbox hats. The two of them and the children got in and out of limousines as quickly as they could, turning away from photographers’ flashes.

“How about a walk. An ice cream cone?” he said to Rachel K.

She hadn’t expected a walk, an ice cream. She’d expected go to the palace Green Room and cooperate fully . But his tenderness — opals, dresses, ice cream cones — was part of why she liked him best, of the presidents she’d known. Not because he spoiled her, but because he could be embarrassing and sentimental, a fragile man who needed comforting. When the press rejected him, he sulked to Rachel K; his wife rejected him as well.

They left the club and went to nearby La Rampa, a grand avenue of deluxe sundae parlors where the rich strolled and licked. Exclusive confection boutiques that would later be replaced by an enormous state-run ice cream emporium, a concrete spaceship that gave away twenty-five thousand bowls of government-issue vanilla and strawberry every day, a drab and massive enterprise that would be the future government’s elaborate fuck you to the rich, to the presidents and their escorts, who’d strolled and licked along La Rampa in Havana’s diamond days.

Prio chose chocolate and she guava, a fruit that tasted deliciously unnatural, more like feminine poisons, perfume, or shampoo, than something you were supposed to eat. They were strolling and licking and window-shopping along La Rampa, Rachel K laughing at Prio, who looked unpresidential, she said, with ice cream in his mustache. A member of his dark-suited security team, who normally walked a few paces behind, approached and tapped Prio’s shoulder. The man leaned in and whispered something. Prio blanched. He turned to Rachel K.

“I must leave you now. Lelo here will take you back to the club.”

That night on La Rampa, March 10, 1952, was Prio’s last night as president. With the military’s cooperation, Fulgencio Batista staged a coup. Batista had telephoned from Miami, promising to buy all the officers new uniforms. In return they gave undying loyalty and surrounded the palace with tanks.

“Easy as ordering a birthday cake from Schrafft’s,” Rachel K later heard an American at the Cabaret Tokio remark loudly. One moment Prio was laughing and window-shopping, his wife and children fast asleep in the private wing of the palace. An hour later he and his family were huddled in the piss elegance of the Dominican embassy, booking airline tickets out. They settled in Miami. Prio wrote to Rachel K that he planned to enroll in theater classes and pursue his lifelong dream of becoming an actor. People talked about the coup as the end of democracy. Until later in the week, when the American ambassador endorsed the new government. Batista had been president before, a celebrated army general the Americans knew and liked.