Fidel's Last Days Read online

  “I’ve worked for them for eight years now, Uncle. I know their philosophy.”

  “But you don’t know the actual people, not even their names, do you?”

  “I know they want Fidel gone as much as you do, as much as we all do.”

  “Gone and replaced by what? A slightly less leftist regime?”

  “Uncle. The people who run the organization I work for have the same set of beliefs as you and I. They are motivated by compassion. They want to see people live in freedom. Their worldview is based on one idea: that a free market means a free world. It’s a very simple and very powerful idea, and so far it has proven correct everywhere on earth that it has been applied.”

  “You’re giving me lessons in capitalism now, Angelito?”

  “I’m trying to understand why you’re resisting me. If I were a nephew and not a niece, would you resist like this? If the organization had sent a man you didn’t know with the same proposal, would you resist? Do you really think we are going to remove a communist and replace him with a leftist?”

  He shook his head sadly, but not in answer to the question. She felt as if she were losing him, had already lost him. She was sure, now, that Oleg should have sent someone else on this errand. She hesitated a moment, took a sip of wine, then played the last card in her hand. “If you are not interested, you are not interested, but the other thing I wanted to mention is that my superiors would like you to be part of the interim government, if you’re willing. Part of, not head of—that position will have to go to someone who is presently living in communist Cuba.”

  That finally stopped him. He had heard everything else before. But this idea, that he would be called back, that he could serve . . . it reached him through almost fifty years of bad history, the death of both parents and his brothers and sister-in-law, the betrayal of his closest friends, the torture and murder of countrymen he knew and loved. He struggled for a moment to keep his confident mask in place, ashamed to show anything else to her. He looked at the wine as if afraid to lift it to his mouth. She pretended that the scraps of her sesame chicken with mangoes were as intriguing as a newly discovered Monet canvas, and shifted them this way and that on the plate until he was ready.

  “It’s real, then,” he said. “We won’t have to wait for him to die of old age or resign because of ill health.”

  “Absolutely real.”

  “You know,” he began, then he stopped and bored his eyes into hers. “You know what a sin it would be to give your uncle false hope in a situation like this, at his age.”

  She knew exactly what a sin it would be, precisely what a sin it would be. She made her face blank, then let some hurt leak into it. “I wouldn’t lie to you,” she lied. “Ever.”

  He watched her with what almost seemed like admiration. He said, “No, you would not. I apologize,” but she couldn’t be sure he meant it. Her bloodline carried a gene for efficient deception. It was one of the reasons she was so good at what she did, and one of the reasons he was. He watched her more intently. She knew that, if he had decided to trust her, he would begin talking about her father and mother, the old days along Eighth Street Southwest, Calle Ocho. He said, “You know, your father was a very courageous man. A brave man among brave men. I promised him I would watch over you, promised I would keep you always from becoming entangled in the web that man has woven around our lives.”

  She thought, for just an instant, that he was referring to her ex-husband. But that marriage was something Roberto never spoke about. It was Fidel, he meant. The Evil One. Sometimes it seemed to her that Cuban Americans invested Castro with blame for everything from their lost haciendas to the ear infections of their children. “That was never a promise you could keep.”

  “But I made it sincerely.”

  “I know you did, Uncle.”

  “We live in the rubble of ruined promises, you and I and the rest of us.”

  “I know that. I’m trying to take those stones and rebuild some small good thing. I left the government because they wouldn’t let me focus on that problem, because there were too many obstacles—legal, bureaucratic, financial, political. You never understood that I left the government because I wanted to work for Cuba. I’ve devoted the last eight years of my career to preparing for this assignment. And not just to make you proud and happy.”

  “No, but always you had me in mind.”

  “Always. And always I thought you put too much faith in the United States government. They use you, Uncle. They—the Republicans especially—use Cuba for their own political ends.”

  “Only the Republicans have ever done anything for us, Angelito. ”

  “What have they done? The man is still in power. The people of the country are still in chains. It’s been forty-seven years, Uncle, and how many Republican presidents?”

  “Five. I have given money to all of them.”

  “What have they done?”

  He shrugged, looked out sadly over the waterway, and said, “They did not, at least, take a little boy away from his family at gunpoint.”

  Elian Gonzalez had been, to the older generation of Cuban Americans, a symbol of some imagined old Cuba, the perpetual innocent victim. A symbol of their own stolen innocence. Cuban to the bone, she still could not imagine what it would be like to have had a life like her uncle had known in Cuba, and then to have it torn away from you. Whatever their differences, she always acknowledged that pain in him. “You knew I would act,” he went on, “if you asked me to act in this way.”

  “No, I didn’t know that. I still don’t. I wonder if your woman will mind.”

  “My woman?”

  “Your anger. I’ve always wondered if you could keep it out of the room long enough to do something like this the way it must be done.”

  He looked away and made a series of small nods, and she believed she could actually see a bruise on the huge, proud creature that seemed to surround him like a larger self. She hated that Latin pride, that machismo, the boys on the corner of Calle Ocho with bare arms hooked around their girlfriends’ necks. Their swagger, their loud cars, their violence. They were the offspring of a humiliation that stretched back five hundred years, beyond Castro to the cane fields of Camagüey and Oriente, and beyond them even to the Spanish galleons. Those boys, some of them so deliciously handsome, had tried to hook their arms around her and she had sprinted as fast and as far as it was possible to go . . . and then found herself being tugged gently back again, not all the way back, but closer, into her Cubanness, one high-heeled foot feeling around tentatively in the old world.

  “How life moves,” Roberto said. “Now it is you leading and the old uncle following.” He swallowed. Looking into her eyes, he said, “I will risk my own life for you. And I will risk the lives of the men and women I love for you.”

  Which was all she had come to hear. For a few moments then she was almost overcome by a wave of guilt. They would perhaps need her uncle’s contacts in Cuba and Miami, but not in the way she had promised, not for the event or its immediate aftermath, but much later. He would be part of the new Cuba, yes, but his role would be tiny and symbolic, a bridge to the Miami Diaspora, and she tried to imagine him shrinking his pride down far enough to fit it. Perhaps, when he found out the actual size of his involvement, the actual details of what her employers called the Havana Project, he would never speak to her again.

  “We will need that very soon,” she said.

  “Claro, comandante,” he answered, with some irony. It was Castro’s title.

  “Has the situation in the military changed at all?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” he said. “Not since they arrested Davos.”

  Good again, she thought. “But you still have your contacts there?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you could get word to them on short notice?”

  “Absolutely. But if I were to do that, if I were to risk their lives in that way, again, I would need a guarantee from you that this time the odds of failure
are extremely low.”

  “I guarantee it with my life,” she said.

  “How can you, Angelito?”

  “Because I am going there myself.”

  “To kill him?”

  “The United States will have no part in his death.”

  “Earlier you said the United States government will have no part in his death. You no longer work for the United States government.”

  “To the extent humanly possible, I guarantee it.”

  He watched her for a long time without blinking. “Then I shall offer my assistance in any way you ask.”

  She nodded. They let a silence grow between them, a silence made up of two parts warm family unity and one part pure difference. Old conversations, old hurts rose and burst in the air around her like a silent fireworks display. She willed herself to ignore them. For a minute or two, she and her uncle tried to shift back into lighter talk, but there was too much weight in the air between them now for that. He wanted details—the time, the method, the chosen successor, how the DGI and armed forces would be dealt with—and she could not provide them. He pressed her, gently, seductively; and with each “No,” each molecule of misinformation, she placed another layer of hard shell over herself. It was, she could see, maddening to him. Here was a man who, simply by the power of his personality, his fortune, and his family name, commanded the loyalty of people he had not seen in decades. He could buy and sell small cities. After the death of his wife, he’d had a string of remarkable women in his life. And now a rebellious, stubborn, thirty-five-year-old niece was frustrating him like this.

  “I’ll contact you,” she said, when he had secured the check and was holding it down beneath the palm of one hand so she could not look at it. “Indirectly the next time, but soon.”

  “I am,” he said gravely, “the master of waiting.”

  She kissed him with some warmth, then turned away and walked calmly back through the restaurant doors, rode calmly down in the elevator, and retrieved the beautiful car that did not belong to her. She handed the Haitian man a ten-dollar tip as a sort of apology for her apparent wealth, as an offering to the Caribbean gods for the sin she had just committed. And then she was driving over the bridge toward downtown Miami, on the verge of tears, glancing in the rearview mirror every few seconds, as if expecting the ghosts of the past to be standing on her bumper.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When Carlos entered Olochon’s prison office, the Dentist was washing his hands in a small bathroom with the door open and humming along happily and off-key with a tune on his radio. Carlos looked at his powerful back—which was still, after all these years, the back of a cane cutter—and tried to make out the tune. Olochon was splashing away at first, and then seemed to be cleaning his fingernails. He glanced in the mirror as if he hadn’t been expecting anyone, hadn’t made any calls that morning, but when he recognized Carlos he smiled, his teeth angling out, hideous even from this distance. Olochon spent a long time drying his hands with a small white towel—as if he might rub away all the suffering those hands had caused over the decades—then turned and came out to greet his visitor.

  “Sit, my friend and comrade, sit,” Olochon said, showing the teeth again, as if he was proud of them. His face was square as a concrete block, with short-cropped gray hair above a flat forehead. The eyes were large and dark, set over a straight nose. He might have been handsome had it not been for the mouth, but the mouth was grotesque, the lips mashed and scarred from early beatings, the yellow front teeth too large by half and slanting forward as if something had been pulled out from between them by force years before. Olochon was wearing fatigues with the stars of a colonel sewn onto the epaulets, and combat boots—his work clothes. He sat behind his desk and rested his immaculately clean hands on its surface. Carlos sat opposite him.

  “Forgive the unusual summons,” Olochon said. “I called you at home first but the line was busy, and then no one answered, so I tried Jose.”

  This was a lie, of course. Olochon opened his mouth and snakes came out, a mass of swirling snakes, hissing and flexing. Carlos nodded and did what he could to maintain a pleasant, slightly distracted expression.

  “The phone lines have gotten so bad,” Olochon went on.

  This was not a lie, but a trick. Olochon was hoping to elicit some complaint, some criticism of the regime. Carlos said, “My lines are fine.”

  “Yes, in that neighborhood.” Olochon, who lived in the same neighborhood, looked out the barred window at the roof of the rest of the prison. His ugly smile slowly disappeared. “Ah, the troubles we have,” he said.

  “Anything in particular? We had talked about tuberculosis last time. Has there been—”

  Olochon chuckled. “Illnesses in the prison don’t worry me as they worry you,” he said. “Illnesses among rats, among vermin. We don’t let the sick ones leave; it’s as simple as that. Ever. They don’t leave, they don’t infect anyone but themselves.”

  “And the guards?”

  “Our guards have little contact with rats and vermin.”

  “They breathe the same air.”

  Olochon worked his lips thoughtfully over his teeth, lazily raised his eyebrows, and gazed around the bare-walled room a moment to give the foolish subject time to leak away. From beyond the door came muted cries and wails. Even the radio music could not quite drown them out. “I didn’t call you—that is, ask you—here to talk in your official capacity, Carlos, but in your unofficial.”

  “I wasn’t aware that I had an unofficial capacity.”

  Olochon turned his dark eyes on him and watched without blinking. “As adviser to the regime,” he said, at last.

  “My advice is not worth as much as it used to be.”

  The eyebrows went up. “No?”

  Carlos shook his head.

  “Your passion for the Revolution has been dampened?”

  “No more than yours, Felix. Every new move of the norteamericanos reignites it. But I don’t feel as sharp as I once did. I feel Fidel notices.”

  “He’s had problems with you?”

  “We’re like brothers, we’ve always been. He loves and trusts me as I love and trust him. I serve as his personal physician, as you know.”

  “But?”

  “But, outside the field of health, I don’t feel I can offer him what I used to.”

  “Politically, you mean.”

  “He needs no help politically. I try now to stick to matters of health. AIDS, TB, sexual diseases brought to us by tourists from the capitalist countries. That’s more than enough work for a man my age.”

  “No hobbies?”

  “Gardening. Good cigars.”

  “No new women?”

  “One. You know her. Elena. Not a substitute for Teresa, but a good and faithful companion. And you?”

  A harsh laugh burst from Olochon’s lips. He seemed unable to hold it in, and, once it was out, he seemed amused by it, as by the question. “Women my age have no appeal for me any longer.”

  “Ah.”

  “Young flesh now, only young flesh.”

  “Yes. The beauty of youth.”

  “The innocence,” Olochon said.

  “Yes.”

  “I deal in so much guilt, you see. Guilt everywhere. Stinking guilt all day and all night. For my private life I want the opposite, you see.”

  “Of course. You’re busy then? Here, I mean.”

  “As always. We have uncovered . . . we are beginning to uncover a massive web of anti-Revolutionary conspiracy. You certainly must have heard about it.”

  “Fidel has not mentioned anything specific.”

  “No, but you must have heard.”

  Carlos could feel his heart thumping. It was only by a severe exertion of will that he managed to keep the expression on his face from changing. “I haven’t.”

  “Not a whisper?”

  “Nothing.”

  Olochon pursed his lips and looked away as if making it clear he knew he had just been lied to
.

  A leaden silence filled the air between them. Carlos knew that he should not break it, but sit calmly, looking from his interrogator to the stained stone wall behind him, and rest in an old friendship and comradeship that had never actually existed. He thought of Colonel Davos, who had died in this very prison. Driven insane with electric shocks. For the crime of being a man of principle, an honorable man.

  Olochon began tapping the end of one long fingernail on the top of the desk, not quite in time with the radio music. “I tell you this in confidence, of course.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Through the diligent work of my men we have uncovered the tip—just the very tip—of another assassination plot. We haven’t done enough work to be sure yet, but it seems to have its roots . . . where would you guess?”

  “Miami.”

  “No surprise, is it.”

  “None.”

  “But the surprise is that this time it has—again, we are not certain so I probably should say it seems—it seems to have reached its ugly tendrils high up into our own government.”

  “How high?”

  “Cabinet level.”

  “Military?”

  Olochon shrugged.

  Carlos watched him. “I’m picturing the various generals and colonels and going through possibilities,” he said. “None of them believable.”

  Olochon continued tapping. “This building . . . what I have seen and learned over the years in this building is that the border that separates believable from unbelievable is nonexistent. People do surprising things, Carlos my friend. Believe surprising things. People change.”

  “Who then?”

  “We don’t know, but we will know. I have had the pleasure, over the past week, of enjoying a series of conversations with a person, a rat, who was arrested not long after making contact with a so-called tourist from one of the so-called sympathetic countries of Europe. In the course of these conversations I have been able to elicit certain information, very helpful to us, and the information points to an attempt to overthrow our government. This attempt is based, as you guessed, in Miami. The how, the when, the who exactly, this rat did not seem to have been privy to. I believe that, if he had known, he would have been kind enough to share that information with me. We were up all night more than once.” Olochon looked at his hands. “Talking.”