Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

When it was over, he drove me home and helped me into bed. I slept for two days.

“¿Y a esa qué le pasa?” Mami asked.

Carlito lied, told her I’d eaten some rotten bistec and just to make me some caldo to settle my stomach.

With Nesto in front of me, talking about his family, I consider for a moment all the times I might have created a family of my own, and where I would be now if I’d let that happen.

The only certain thing is that I wouldn’t be here now, on this island, with him.

“Why did you leave them to come here?” I ask. “Your children, I mean.”

“I didn’t leave them. I just took the first step. So I can throw out the rope and they can come behind me.”

Nesto left Cuba three years ago but he tells me he’d been trying to get off the island long before that. Like so many, he says, he was just waiting to find a way.

As a boy he’d dive with the other kids from the rocks below the Malecón, practicing holding their breath underwater, counting the seconds, the minutes that passed, timing each other, seeing how deep each could go, vowing one day they’d be brave enough to swim to La Yuma on the other side of the Straits.

But life passes quickly, he tells me, even when the days are all the same— especially when the days are all the same.

One day he was already a man, sitting on the same seawall, watching the younger boys launch themselves from the rocks below as he’d done, taking in the ocean, that slippery surf, thinking of those who died trying to cross, many of whom were the parents, uncles, brothers, and friends of people he knew, who left the island full of hope yet never made it across the water.

His generation had been raised on horror stories of how bad it was in other countries, how the world, particularly the yanquis, hated Cubans, and if they were to leave and actually make it to a foreign land, they’d only suffer and starve and beg to come back. But by then their assets would have been seized, their identities erased, and in Cuba, the land they’d forsaken, they would no longer exist.

Through the whispers of Radio Bemba, they heard when bodies washed up on the beaches, bodies of those who tried to get away and failed, and the people who would drift for days in the open sea and touch land only to realize the serpentine current had played with them, taking them far out only to deposit them on another part of the island.

They’d hear how the fattest sharks in the world are the ones swimming between their island and the Florida shores. Havana’s cemetery is not the Cementerio Colón, he told me; its real necropolis is the ocean floor, covered with the bones of those who went to rest with Olokun, orisha of the deep.

Even so, when the rods and planks of broken balsas smashed against the rocks or turned up on the sand, and even though getting caught trying to leave could get you a year in prison, it wouldn’t be long before someone picked up the scraps of those broken rafts and used them to build another.

Nesto was a good swimmer, with strong limbs and large lungs. He knew about tides and currents, and could read clouds and wind as easily as the alphabet. But he respected the sea too much to challenge it.

If you go to the city of Regla, Nesto says, you will find people at the church of the Virgin that keeps vigil over the Havana harbor, placing flowers at her altar, asking Yemayá, orisha of the living part of the sea, to help them find a way across. Nesto went there himself many times.

“But if Yemayá answered every petition that came to her feet,” he tells me, “the island would be empty.”

Both his parents were teenagers when the rebels came out of the Sierra Maestra, and they grew into faithful socialists. They were believers in the dreams and promises of the Revolution and wanted their children to grow up with blind devotion to the regime. His mother went from being a grocer’s daughter to joining the literacy brigades in the campo to teach peasants how to read, and later working for the Ministry of Agriculture, helping to broker sugarcane deals with Canada and the Eastern Bloc. His father, the guajiro who joined the army after the cows of the family he worked for in the campo were nationalized, proudly went to battle in Angola and made it back alive only to die a few months later in a crash while riding in the sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle. Nesto was seven. The family conspired to hide the truth. For the funeral week, he’d been sent to stay at the home of a cousin in Alamar. For another year, the family would collectively lie, saying that Nesto’s father had gone back to Angola. Until he thought to ask, “Is my father dead?” and his mother reluctantly nodded yes.

They’d always been a proud communist family. Like everyone else.

“I didn’t have a father so people said I should think of Fidel as my father,” Nesto says. “And I was a good little pionero. I studied my Russian lessons in school. I wore my blue scarf with pride and couldn’t wait until I got old enough to wear the red one. Like every other kid, I chanted ¡Por el comunismo, seremos como el Che! and I believed those words. I wanted to be like him, so brave and intelligent and charming, a hero who died for his ideals. I was named Ernesto for him, after all. It was the most honorable name you could give a boy in those days. Now it’s the name I’m embarrassed to have. But at least I didn’t get stuck with a Russian name like my sisters and many of my friends.”

His parents had dutifully abandoned God for the State, as was encouraged. They were exactly the kind of young people the Revolution hoped for — soon bewitched by the teachings of Marx and the doctrine of Lenin, devout believers in the promises the regime made for the future of the island — and thought there was nothing old religions could offer anymore. But Nesto’s grandmother was a follower of La Regla de Ocha and had managed to have him and his sisters baptized Catholic as babies, even if Christmas was still illegal, and eventually paid for him to go to a babalawo and receive his orishas when he was sixteen even though his mother was opposed to it.

That’s how Nesto learned he’d been claimed by the orisha Elegguá, controller of destiny, and by the warrior Ogún, protector of orphans and orisha of tools and labor. The babalawo divined that Elegguá would show Nesto his path and Ogún, machete in hand, would help him to clear it. From a S antero he received his collares, elekes, beads of devotion, black and red for Elegguá, and black and green for Ogún, which he now wears around his neck so they fall over his heart.

An iyalocha later told Nesto, through a divination guided by Orunmilá, that his future lay on the other side of the sea and the orishas would help him find a way to cross it.

She said he was lucky to be claimed by Elegguá, identified as the Anima Sola, the lonely spirit, one of the souls suffering in purgatory, enduring purification by flames until being freed to heaven, because for Nesto there would be struggles too, she warned, but in the end, there would be salvation, and the promise of paradise beyond his dreams.

There are ways to get here, Nesto tells me, beyond the balsa. A ride on a boat ferrying people across the Florida Straits would have cost an impossible ten thousand U.S. dollars in a peso economy, and he didn’t have anyone abroad who could pay it for him. Even if granted an exit permit, a legitimate visa through the U.S. Interests Section took years to process through waitlists and bureaucratic delays. The rumor was the twenty-thousand-visa quota was more likely filled by white Cubans rather than Afro-Cubans and the only way to move ahead in the line was with bribes.

“As we say over there, in Cuba one has to wait in line even to die.”