Lisa Wixon - Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban

Disappearing, around here, is endemic.

Unless you count Walrus. He whizzes by in his smoke-belching Lada, waving hello.

THE ROAD TO Morón is full of potholes followed by spacious freeways that end abruptly, and dozens of kilometers from any village or city. On the lonely stretches of new pavement, we pass few cars but several bouncy ox-and-carts pulling sugarcane and pineapples. Leathery-skinned cowboys squint behind the reins.

The freeways’ billboards of propaganda grow more hostile the further south we travel from Havana. Stormy graphics demand an end to the American “blockade” and declare a rancor for its enemigoto the north. For my other homeland.

In the countryside, leafy vegetation springs from famously fertile soil, the green so dark as to be nearly black. This panorama is eventually replaced with a parched and dry interior. The early summer sun beats harshly and stings our throats.

At its entrance, a sign welcomes us to Morón. As if that’s not sufficiently hospitable, visitors are greeted with the spectacle of the town mascot at the main entrance: a giant rooster poured from concrete. Daya tells us the village is named for a song about a rooster who continued to crow, even after it had been defeathered.

“That’s one tenacious cock,” quips Richard, snorting laughter through his cocaine-addled nose.

He’d arrived in Havana the night before, and by our midmorning departure, Daya had employed her mother’s savvy and already procured several items of new clothing.

“My alter ego, if he could talk, would say this: Richard, your girlfriend finds a dressmaker and buys four outfits before breakfast? She’s not from Morón—you are!” Though she speaks no English, Daya senses when the joke’s on her, and a swollen thumb returns to her mouth.

Morón is poor and dry, and its Radio Bemba—traveling on lower frequencies here—rapidly delivers news of the habaneros’arrival. Within a few brief moments, our car is surrounded. Daya is Morón’s prodigal daughter, returning home with her walking, fifty-something lotto ticket, a gift-producing golden hen, and she beams at the collective envy and pride and hatred. Hers is a true immigrant’s homecoming.

Daya’s father turns out to be a revolutionary hardliner with firsthand tales of long-ago dissidents brewing war in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Because of this, and Richard’s substantial age, I’m certain there will be problems in his approving Daya’s boyfriend. I hold my breath while the father sizes up the disparate couple sitting hand-in-hand on a little wooden bench in the humble room.

Richard catches my eye, and I do my best to keep up with the translations. When a young, dark-skinned woman walks by, Daya stops her and introduces us. She can’t be more than nineteen or twenty.

“ Mira,my father’s wife,” Daya says. “She’s his sixth.”

“His wife?” says Richard, incredulous. “That’s his sixth wife? Well, dry your eyes, I’ve no worries at all.”

By the end of the night, the father is back-slapping Daya’s boyfriend, the two fast friends. My stomach turns at the whole scenario, as it does with much of what happens in Cuba, and I keep looking around for someone to validate my unease. What kind of father pimps out his teenage daughter? And to a man his own age? I must be the only person alive who feels this may be wrong somehow. As it would turn out, I am not.

YOU KNOW SHE staged this in her mind, planned ahead. Schemed. Every insult or slight against her was going to be rectified tonight.

It’s only her naïveté that prevented her from knowing the police wouldn’t stand for it. No big-city export was coming home and rubbing her new wealth in their faces. Not when it was counterrevolutionary wealth.

Wearing the gifts Richard brought from London, Daya looks stunning in a tomato-red, halter-top gown by Carolina Herrera. One that contrasts beautifully with her greenish-brown skin and greenish-brown eyes, as if the soil and foliage of Cuba had infiltrated her mother’s womb.

It’s the only disco in town, dirt-floored, and open-skied, and full of teenagers posturing with their Chinese bicycles. She dragged that Carolina Herrera through the mud, dragged the boyfriend, too, and I could hear her silently tick off the malfeasances. The boys who’d cheated, the girls who’d talked dirt. They all parted, gaujirosin shock, as she waltzed through the crowd until she arrived at the foot of its elevated stage. It was there that the young dancer unleashed the sublimation of her Havana-trained moves. Richard beamed at his young love. The crowd gaped.

Cops took her by the neck.

Richard and I spent the night before an unsmiling police commissioner.

Trips were made throughout town to confirm the story. That Daya was sleeping at her father’s, and not in the tourist room with Richard two blocks away, where her suitcases were discreetly tucked away by landlords before it could all be proven false.

Regardless, Daya was issued a written warning, ostensibly for being underage at a disco. A rule until then never enforced.

Richard believed the infraction to be inconsequential.

But Daya and I knew the truth. That the record meant she’d been caught carousing with a sex tourist. Two more in her file, and she’d find herself cutting sugarcane in the countryside.

S lowly, my feetascend the eighty-eight-step precipice of white-stone purity leading to the neoclassical platform at the University of Havana. Up here, the ocean’s breeze erases the street pollution, and the country’s top students stride purposefully through celestial grounds.

Under Batista’s regime, his gun-slinging thugs and army weren’t allowed on the sacred site. The campus, instead, was deemed a safe haven for all, including gangsters, political troublemakers, and the maniacal.

The university is no longer a protected zone, and all must be well-behaved here, like anywhere. Yet I’m certain its former political neutrality is an unconscious reason Victor chose the grounds to stage our final meeting. One where he promises to deliver the address of my Havana family—information culled from discreet and classified sources and papers “misplaced” by the power of my blood money.

Perspiration mars Victor’s face as he sits nervously on a cactus-shaded bench next to an armored tank parked permanently in a corner of the campus’s main square. Under copper-and-cream pillars, I await his discreet signal and then slide next to him. Part of me feels guilt over tempting Victor with the cash he desperately needs, knowing he’s risking, or believes to be risking, social and political consequences for his classified snooping.

“We are surrounded,” he announces, and I feel a sudden fear, “by philosophy—” He points, as I relax, at one building after another. “And law, and mathematics, and history, as contained in those buildings.”

Victor pulls out a sliver of cardboard from his pocket and hands it to me. No one would dream of wasting an envelope or a whole sheet of paper on one small line of writing, no matter how momentous the words. Even wood pulp is a luxury in my homeland.

On the scrap, the following is written: Calle M, Number 3051.

The Santero was right. If it’s indeed my family’s home, then it’s just a few blocks from my former house. And only two streets away from where I live now with Camila.

“What if it’s wrong, what if they’ve moved?”

Victor mops his forehead with a hanky. “I know you only have two months before you leave. But I’ve gone as far as I may, in good conscience, in helping you. I have a family to protect. If your father is not there, then I’m sorry. Our business together is done.”

“Thank you,” I say, kissing his cheek. “I’m sorry you…I’m sorry about the risks.” Folding the bills, I slip him the last few precious hundreds earned by dancing for Uncle Morty.