names, waved, cursed, pushed, grabbed and jostled for a better position. Everyone thrust forward trying to be the first to see Frank, to claim him as one of their own and scream his name and hang onto him and cover him with love and tears. But he was not there for any of them.
His spine tightened. This was la tierra de Papi y Mami: the forbidden island, the place his parents had escaped forty years before. This was a Cuba mired deep in the myth of exile. It was the genesis of his mother’s horror stories. She had whispered them to Frank and Pepe like bedtime stories, telling in excruciating detail the atrocities the government had committed on his unknown relatives. She told them about Fidel’s coldhearted cruelty, about how in the days after the Revolution he had rounded up thousands of innocent people in the streets of Havana and executed them without trial and in cold blood, about how he stole land and property to compensate the illiterate peasants that had helped bring him to power, about how he turned one of the richest countries in the world into one of the poorest, about how his beard stank of death, and how the tobacco they used to make his cigars was soaked in the blood of his enemies because he believed it endowed him with power and longevity.
Frank forced his way through the crowd and found a seat in the back of the air-conditioned tour bus. He leaned his head against the window and searched the crowd for the infamous secret police his mother had always warned him about. But all he could see was an innocent mass hoping to reconnect with long lost family.
On the route to the hotel—Avenida Independencia and then Boyeros—depressing gray concrete buildings and apartment complexes followed one another like a long forgotten proletarian utopia. Everyone dressed as if they had acquired their clothes from a thrift store in New Jersey. They waited at traffic lights on the street and outside bodegas. They looked old, tired, their faces creased with the complexities of socialist life, their postures folded by the weight of differential acceptance. The entire panorama was short on charm and long on depression.
But as they came around the Plaza de la Revolución and entered the Vedado neighborhood, Frank’s paranoia dissipated at the sight of the majestic older homes with long verandahs and lush gardens. All of it beautiful. All of it slowly turning to dust.
The lobby of the Hotel Sevilla was a vintage postcard: tall ceilings, huge open windows, dark wood shutters, and walls dressed with colorful Moorish tiles. The percussion of a conga drum and the picking of a guitar flowed from the patio and blended with the loud conversations of brightly dressed tourists and their Cuban friends
The desk clerk flipped through the pages of Frank’s passport and smiled. “Americano. Miami?”
“No.” Frank’s eyes strayed nervously about the lobby. “New York.”
“Ah, New York City. The New York Yankees, eh? You know El Duque?” He slammed the palm of his hand hard against the counter. “Ese hombre es un fenómeno. Is he not the best pitcher in the world? He was with the Industriales before he defected. Now he goes and wins the World Series for the Yankees. I guarantee you he will do it again. And again.”
A man at the end of the long counter turned away, unfolded a brochure and appeared to read. Behind him, a trio of young Cuban women in tight-fitting dresses and high heels loitered at the entrance of the hotel.
“Please tell me,” the clerk said, “do you go see them play at Yankee Stadium?”
Frank shook his head. “I don’t really follow the game.”
“Ah, señor. If I lived in your country I would attend every game. You know, I have two uncles and a brother in Miami. Fanáticos de los Marlins. They went during Mariel in 1980.”
Frank locked eyes with the clerk for the first time. “It must be difficult, them being so far.”
The clerk waved. “No, qué va. It’s not far.” He stamped the hotel vouchers and handed Frank a guest card and a coupon for his complimentary cocktail at the patio bar.
Frank asked the bartender to make his mojito a double. As he drank, the muscles around his neck slackened. The Havana Club rum, the lime, the fresh yerba buena, and the sugar took him away to a place that was primitive and tropical. Exotic. The musicians fell into a soft romantic song about flowers and love. European perfumes and sweat and the smoke of a distant cigar blended into something reminiscent of his mother’s nostalgia for the Cuba of her youth.
Then a fleeting memory from his own childhood filled his head—playing catch with his father in the backyard, Rosa singing in the kitchen, the family gathered together in the living room. Filomeno laughing.
But it was too quick. The clerk’s words came back to haunt him: it’s not so far. Not so far. For Filomeno, Cuba had been a world away. No country could have been farther from Houston than Cuba, as a place or a memory. It had been Filomeno’s decision not to settle in Miami after escaping Cuba in 1959. He refused to contact his extended family. He badgered Rosa and trampled all over her nostalgia with his own ideas of what it was to be American: watching sitcoms, mowing the lawn and spending Sunday afternoons grilling hot dogs and hamburgers in the backyard. It was as if he were trying to live inside a television commercial, eating eggs over easy with too much Tabasco sauce and his hot dogs with mayonnaise. He smoked filtered Viceroys and loved chocolate ice cream.
Frank hated the charade, not because he was Cuban, but because he was American. To him Filomeno was a caricature of the other suburban fathers in the neighborhood—working at a refinery in Pasadena, hanging out at Ice Houses on Friday afternoons after work. He’d liked Gilley’s long before they made Urban Cowboy. He took his shoes off when he got home from work and ate dinner while watching Wheel Of Fortune, calling the words and phrases out loud to Susan Carney just like any other father. He argued with his wife, bought a Lotto ticket every Friday, snored, kept a bottle of Tums by his bedside and hated Swiss cheese.
But Rosa refused to give in to him. She loved Cuba and she hung on to it through her kitchen. She spent hours cooking arroz con pollo, boliche, picadillo, and ajiaco from scratch. She infused the house with the permanent aroma of sofrito.
For all his effort, Filomeno’s American style remained rough around the edges like the Spanish accent he couldn’t completely shake off. And there was always the silence.
What had hung over their little ranch house—the three bedrooms, two baths and a one-car garage with a live oak tree in the backyard—was more than the sadness that accompanies a life in exile. There was resentment. Anger. Filomeno’s hate for Cuba ran so violently in his veins, it was as if he wanted to erase the past completely. As far as Filomeno was concerned, he and Rosa would forget Cuba and become Americans if it killed him. And perhaps it had.
3
“I prefer my rice cooked with a few habanero peppers. Not just for a little spice, but for the familiar flavor of my mother’s kitchen.”
—Cuban heavyweight boxer, Téofilo Stevenson
after winning his third Olympic gold medal. Moscow, 1980
Frank moved quickly around his hotel room, looking for peepholes, microphones, bugs, cameras, anything suspicious. He mimicked the spy movies he had seen, running his hands over the plain wood furniture, the lamps, the curtains. He checked behind the mirror and under the bed.
Nothing.
He dug out the card where Justo had written his brother’s contact information and asked the operator to put the call through. After a few tones and clicks, she came back on the line or—as Frank suspected—had never left the line and informed him there was no answer.
He
