Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

Even with the long-gone relatives in Miami filing the paperwork for him on the other side, Nesto knew that boys like him — healthy, strong — were rarely given permission to leave, too obvious a risk for immigration, and the aging Revolution needed its youth.

He still played basketball almost every day on the unpaved, rock-pitted court a few streets from his family’s house in Buenavista, shooting at a backboard with no hoop. One day the priest from the church where Nesto sometimes went for English classes came looking for him. He told Nesto the church’s basketball team had been invited to play in an inter-diocesan tournament in Mexico City.

Nesto understood what the priest was offering.

He played the match, helped the church team win, and defected the night of their victory, thanking and saying good-bye to the priest, who also showed Nesto the way to sneak out of the dormitory. He slept on church steps and park benches until he made his way to Matamoros, where he walked across the border to Brownsville, identifying himself as Cuban at the customs office, and was given asylum.

From there he bused it to Miami, where his father’s eldest brother, who’d fled in the sixties, waited for him at the station, took him to buy clothes, showed him around, and helped him find a job with a friend repairing air conditioners and refrigerators in the bodegas and cafeterias of Sweetwater and Hialeah.

He made some friends. Guys who taught him how to open a bank account and write a check, taught him about credit and car payments and insurance, and how to use the Internet — things he never had to think about back home. They were guys he would play basketball with on Saturdays at José Martí Park, who spoke the same chabacanería spoken back home, who took him to see bands perform at Cuban clubs, who introduced him to their sisters and other girls also from La Habana — some recently arrived, some who came as children, though they rarely encountered the ones born here to long-settled exiles, those who, when he did meet them, mostly looked down on him for being the son of failed communists, a little Soviet puppet, un recién llegado, a reffy, un cubano más.

He was supposed to be an exile now, too, but didn’t feel like one.

Maybe, he says, because he left the greatest pieces of himself back home.

There were things he liked about Miami: the quimbe and cambalache, the way things could be bartered and traded in daily negocios just as they were back in Havana, a stand-in economy of exchanges and favors, and anything else could be found for cheap at ¡Ñooo! ¡Qué barato! or the Opa-Locka market and the local pulgueros. But there was much that shocked him: the abundance of electricity, the entire city lit up through the night, where the government doesn’t cut the power with no warning; the excess of American supermarkets, so much of everything, so much going to waste.

Sometimes he ran into people from home who’d crossed over before him, already settled with new houses and new families, who seemed so content with their lives over here that they didn’t give much thought anymore to all they’d left behind.

Miami was just as described back home: “Cuba con Coca-Cola.” He liked the sight of fresh paint on buildings and homes, how it seemed there was a factory-fresh car for every person to drive on the smooth paved roads of Miami, lined with palms and working streetlights, everything so new it was as if the whole city came out of a box.

Even if the beaches were not as beautiful as back home, there were neighborhoods that reminded him of Tarará, a shiny fabricated seaside community where primary school kids were taken for an enchanted fifteen days a year, unaware that the residences they stayed in would eventually house the kids who came to Cuba from Chernobyl to heal, and children like Nesto who played in the fields and bathed in the surf would age into the adolescents who had to work for their education out in the campo. There were neighborhoods in Miami lined with imitation Italian and Spanish villas almost as grand as the palaces lining Quinta Avenida, around Vedado, spread through Miramar and Siboney. If he closed his eyes, he could almost convince himself the air was the same on the continent as it blew in off the Atlantic, but he missed the ruffle of the tropical trade winds, and the thick salty mist wafting in from the Straits and from the Caribbean.

The cubanía and cubaneo had eased the shock of his arrival, but after a year, he felt alone, adrift in the last generation’s exiles’ secondhand nostalgia for a country that hadn’t existed in over fifty years, and by street corner rants about what had become of their country by those who refused to go witness it as it was now.

In Cuba, he’d loved to go on long drives to the hills of Viñales and Las Terrazas, to Artemisa, to the beaches beyond Varadero and Matanzas Bay, but gas for the car was expensive, and when things were hard, he went months, even years, without leaving Havana. But once he began making money in this country, enough to start payments on a truck of his own and fill up its tank, he took to the Florida highways, tracing the peninsula, sometimes sleeping on beaches the way he liked to do back home, driving as far north as Virginia, where he saw snow for the first time, then found himself heading farther and farther south, past the edges of the Everglades down to these small islands and, one day, he called his uncle in Miami and told him he’d decided to stay.

Nesto came of age in the eighties, at the height of what he calls the Soviet colonial era in Cuba, fluent in Russian, practicing military exercises in his school at Ciudad Libertad in case of U.S. bombings, and educated like every other child to serve the State. But he grew disillusioned by the Revoluntion’s inconsistencies; everyone was supposedly equal, but when a distant cousin of his father’s had come to visit from Spain, the family wasn’t allowed to enter the hotel where he stayed. And when that relative sneaked Nesto in, at age twelve — and bought him a chocolate bar in the gift shop, with its kiosk full of candies and snacks Nesto had never seen in his life; and sent him home with a sandwich from the hotel restaurant made with a thick, grainy delicious bread so different from the bland, airy white bread made available to regular citizens, wrapped in aluminum foil he’d never seen before either — he understood that nothing on the island was as it appeared.

Nesto realized with the taste of that chocolate bar that he’d been hungry all his life, though it would be a few years until he came to know real hunger, he says, with the institutionalized famine that overtook the island when the Soviets pulled out, what ese called “a special period in time of peace.”

Even the Santeros rationalized the food shortages with the old Yoruba proverb, There is no renewal without decline , and recounted the patakí of how Poverty and Hunger used to walk the earth together, hand in hand, striking in every town as they looked for a place to settle, until the great orisha Obatalá chased them away so that they would have to wander the earth forever. “Poverty and Hunger may have come to visit,” the Santeros said, “but we won’t let them stay.”

Sure, they were already accustomed to periods of vacas gordas and periods of vacas flacas, but this period was different; now there were no cows at all.

With the State-run bodegas empty, his entire family growing thinner by the day, Nesto put his ability to hold his breath for several minutes underwater to use and made a spear out of an old antenna and scrap metal with which he and some friends would fish off the Malecón, taking their catch home to their families, and selling what was left over. But the police caught on and warned that if they kept at it they’d have bigger problems.