©2004 Jeff Percifield
Caribbean Writer 2004

 

 

 

 

 

ÁNGEL MORENO

 

 

I was making mojitos when I first got in on the Plan. I had just negotiated a profit with a fat German tourist who’d tried to give me Euros.  "No Euros," I declared, "only dollars."  He grunted, and slipped me a twenty.  I crushed the mint in the bottom of the glass with a fork, added brown sugar and lemon, ice, rum, and soda, handed him the glass, then me and my friends Luis and Jacobo watched through a broken window while the German porked Marisela, the skinny negrita jinetera[1], on the back seat of a 1947 Impala.

            "He jumps like a frog," Luis said.

            It was entertaining, and besides, we couldn’t watch TV as the power was out in town again. I was seven years old, a black-market entrepreneur in Cuba, a socialist paradise with an OUT OF ORDER sign on it.

            "Ángel Moreno!"

            I turned and blinked: it was Senorita Montes, my mutton-faced teacher.

            "What filthy children!" she snapped.  What was she doing here? She carried a stick with which she swiped at the others, who scrambled out of the way, although she clipped Luis.

            "Look at you!" she said. "What will become of such a child?"

            I tipped my chin up defiantly. "I’m going to be a jinetero!" I declared. She smacked! me across the face.  I hit her back but she grabbed my wrist.

            "You must come with me, Ángel," she said firmly.  "You have a scholarship."

            "Que?" I paled.  In Cuba, to win a scholarship means an appointment with State Security.  What had I done?  Or rather, what hadn’t I done?

            I lived with my Aunt Trina, at least I think she was my aunt.  But I didn’t stay there much because of my hated cousins.  Aunt Trina worked at the Department of Revolutionary Metaphors and her boyfriend was a ‘tour guide,’ meaning he slept with European tourists for hard currency.  I wanted to be a jinetero too when I was a little bigger – say, ten – but right now I hung out with the unemployed, AKA the Defenders of the Revolution. (That is, if the Revolution failed, they would have to go to work.) I mixed drinks, ran bribes, informed, stole dogs for the butcher, and hustled tourists for Marisela, although I hoped to increase my staff. 

            "I didn’t do anything," I insisted, as Senorita Montes hustled me along.

            "That’s the problem, Ángel," she said.  Poor thing, she was too ugly to be a jinetera, so she had to work for pesos.  You can’t eat pesos.

            We came to the school and I froze. Out front was a 1959 black Chevy – it really was State Security, with two beefy mulatos beside it.  But what really worried me was what was next to them – my father. 

            "Hello my shame," he said.

            My mother I hadn’t seen in over two years. I heard she lived in Santiago with her new baby and boyfriend.  I was left alone when my brother Jesús set off for the States on a slab of Styrofoam.

            "Take me with you!" I’d begged him.

            "You’re too little," he said, even though he was only twelve at the time. Now he lived in America where he would be a baseball star like El Duque, and as soon as I could, I would follow. My father showed up once or twice a year and Aunt Trina would tell him horror stories about me. He’d beat me, give her some money, and vanish. But he’d never come to school.

            "Gracias, Senorita," he said with a leer – always the playboy – then yanked! me into the car.

            "Where are we going?" I said as the mulatos drove us away.

            "Listen to me," my father said, "you are not going to ruin this for me, escuchas?" He took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow, as it was humid. "You will do exactly as you are told, you little shit. Or I will break you into pieces."

            We bounced along the steaming asphalt, ruts sprouting weeds and cornflowers, past the sepia countryside, a snapshot frozen since 1959: shanties and naked children, burros, bicycles, listing telephone poles. In Cuba, the modern world had passed us by; if Columbus had pulled up in his caravel, he would have felt right at home. It was a stucco of socialism smeared on a colonial frame, flaking away in the Caribbean torpor.  We had healthcare but no medicine, education but no books, housing but no roofs, a glorious past but no tomorrow.

            And now, it seemed, I was in big trouble. "I didn’t do anything," I announced.

            "You’re just like your mother," my father sneered, "completely worthless."

            I looked at him. "My mother is beautiful," I said.  He looked at me and turned away.  Actually I didn’t even have a picture of my mother, and, sadly, could not recall what she’d looked like, only that she was beautiful. Every time I saw a pretty soft-drink model, or a lovely tourist from Madrid or Buenos Aires, I’d think, she looks just like my mother!

            With some excitement, I watched as we turned towards Havana. Havana, city of ruins, tumbling into the sea!  She was a stained etching in charcoal and faded glory, empty plazas, walls canting every which way as if they did not know that Modern Art was subversive.  She was a tropical beauty who cast off her dour Soviet babushka and now tarted it up in hot pants and pumps, trolling for dollars, but she didn’t pay her bills so they turned off the electricity.

            Across the rooftops, as far as the eye could see, an armada of waving laundry, dirty white flags of underwear: we surrender!  I leaned out the window, smelled frying fish and plantains, whistled at a jinetera with a nose like a toucan, and my father pulled me roughly back. His hair was sweating; I had never seen him this nervous, but then I saw why. We were going up the hill to the mysterious and much-feared Directorate of Democracy.

            They waved us through the triple-guarded gates, we drew up in front of a crumbling staircase embroidered with moss, and the mulato goons ushered us out.  Inside, guards marched us through a maze of shadows and obfuscations, past pillars of lies upholding a framework of failure, iron ramparts of suffering and oppression reared into a tottering tower of ego, corruption, and ruin. We passed wheezing generators labor­ing in the heat, an empty swimming pool shaped like an alligator, shuttered Departments and Compartments and Retrenchments, and finally swept into a grand chamber wall­papered with armed soldiers.  There sat the Council of Ministers, looking darkly at us.  My father held my hand tight in his. No one spoke. Then in strode the Maximum Leader. 

            The Ministers all jumped to their feet. I couldn’t believe it, it was our Supreme Leader himself, AKA El Comandante, El Presidente-for-Life, the Beard, El Loco Supremo, and You-Know-Who, in trademark rumpled fatigues and bristle-brush beard.  He saluted listlessly, motioned for the Council to sit, then turned.

            "Behold!" he bellowed, with a sweep of his long arm, "here is the future of Cuba!"  He was pointing to me.

            My father could not suppress a spasm.

            "There are those who say Cuba is falling behind," the Beard said.  The Ministers all became preoccupied with their buttons. "But I tell you, we are forging ahead along the path to Socialism!"

            I could think of a great many Russians who would say the path led right off a cliff, but kept it to myself.

            "You see," said the Beard, "it is all part of the Plan. Tell me Ángel," he said, swiveling to face me, "why do you think there is no opposition press in Cuba, hmmm? Because there is no paper!  Brilliant, no?!" 

            He grinned hugely, then glowered under his bushy brows until his Ministers applauded tepidly. He lit a cigar and blew a wraith of blue smoke; it looked vaguely like  the Virgin de la Caridad, and he frowned.

            "You see, Ángel," he continued, "we could be rich, if we wanted to.  We could be Miami."

            I must have looked skeptical.

            "Well, we could be Tampa," he said.  "We could be Vegas, for Christ’s sake!"

            "We could?" I said, and my father whapped! me on the head.

            "We could," the Beard repeated, "but we don’t want to. And why? Because of the Mafia," he said.  "It took the Revolution to drive the Mafia out of Cuba, and do you know what it would take to bring it back?  The Disney Channel. That’s all it would take."

            He blew another cloud of smoke, this time Christ on the cross, and angrily waved it away.

            "Comrades!" he thundered, spreading his arms. "We aim for another record in sugar production!" (Meaning, the crop sucked again.)

            "The children of Cuba will have new school uniforms this year!"  (Meaning, shorter pants to save fabric; if mine got any shorter, I’d be wearing a bib.)

            "I am unveiling a new, streamlined, Five Year Plan!" He pulled out a scroll, one end of which dropped to the floor, rolled down the center of the hall, down the steps, and out the door.  The Beard began to recite.

            Several hours later, he was still going strong.  "Point nine hundred and ninety-nine," he read, "in order to increase production, we will set the clocks back every night, thus adding additional days to the month. Socialism triumphs over time!"

            The Ministers had all fallen asleep. The soldiers, too, were dozing, some snoring. My father had dozed off too, right where he stood, weaving slightly.  I was sitting on the floor, drawing a dinosaur with a bit of chalk.  Even the flies were sleepy; one of them buzzed lazily, then dropped onto my drawing with a tiny snore. I brushed it aside.

            "…pass what my pass, fall who may fall, die who may DIE!"

            I looked up. The Beard was posed like a statue, one arm raised, staring defiantly into eternity.  His beetling eyes slid sideways, aware for the first time that the room was not quite rapt.  I quickly raised my hand.

            "Question? Yes?"

            "Por favor," I said, "when are we going to crush the Yanqi dogs?"

            He smiled like a cat.  "Soon, Ángel," he purred, "but we need a little help." (Aside from food, shelter, and electricity, we seemed to be doing just fine.) "We need a teensy weensy bit of assistance, Ángel," he continued, "and you can help us."

            "Me?"

            He raised an eyebrow.  "You do recall Elián?"

            Elián. That little shit, of course I remembered him.  Elián, in the land of milk and Pepsi, we all envied the brat, who could believe he’d want to return to this roofless, decaying No-Fun Zone. Elián! It was all we heard for months. El Loco would close the schools and we’d have to march in the heat chanting Devuelvan a Elián!  Send him home!  (But we didn’t, we made up our own chants, such as Elián, amigo, mandame un abrigo!  Elián, buddy, send me a coat!)

            "Elián was the best thing to happen to me since Khrushchev," the Beard sighed.  "Too bad about the mother though."  He swatted! at a pesky fly, then turned to me. "But that’s where you come in."

            He reached behind his chair, swept up an inner tube (!) and threw it down in front of me, whap! like a gauntlet.  Everyone jumped.

            "You’re going to Florida, my boy!" he grinned, and lit a cigar.

            "Oh boy!" I said.

            His face darkened like blood pudding.  He took several enormous strides towards me and leaned forwards, the awful history of his face just inches from mine.

            "Only – for – a while," he said. He clicked his heels together, spun round, and painted us all a vision of the Plan. "You will be plucked from the sea by Brothers to the Rescue! You will tell them your mother and the rest of your sorry balseros[2] drowned! The exiles will try to keep you, and play right into my hands!  Your anguished father will appear on TV, begging for your return!"

            I looked up at my father; he curled his lip.

            "And in the end," the Beard finished, "you come home, and I get the kind of publicity you just can’t buy.  It’s a win/win thing: you get a trip to Disney World, I get a puff piece with Barbara Walters."

            It all was too amazing!  But something confused me.  "Where is my mother?" I said.  "Is she coming with me?"

            My father looked away.  The Beard knelt down in front of me.  "Don’t worry, Angelito," he said, "your mother will be waiting for you when you return. She’s in on the Plan." 

            And then, just in case I didn’t understand, he leaned forward and whispered what he would do to me if I failed at any point.

            "Comprendes?" he growled.  I gulped, and nodded. "Bueno!" he said. He snapped his fingers at us and strode out, my father dragging me in tow, all the Ministers scurrying in our wake.

            "Our Navy will take you out to sea," Our Leader waved.

            "We have a Navy??" I gushed.  Whap! went my father.

            El Comandante stopped short, so that we all ran into him, and frowned down at me.  "You do know how to swim?" he said.

            I nodded furiously, and his beard split into a wicked grin.

            Unfortunately, he wasn’t kidding about the inner tube. "That’s all?" I said, when we were rolling at sea on the deck of a marked-down Soviet trawler; even Jésus’ piece of Styrofoam was bigger.

            "You’re a balsero," the Beard said, dropping a compass round my neck, "this is coach. Any last words?" he called to my father.

            Seasick, sprawled on a bench with a paper sack at his gorge, my father waved carelessly without looking up.

            "O-kay," the Beard shrugged. And with that he picked me up and threw me overboard.

            I came up gasping, spluttering in the foamy sea.  I kicked my way to the inner tube and clung to the side like a drowned cat.

            "Don’t drink the water!" the Beard barked.  "That’s a joke," he added, and all the Ministers laughed.  And then they left.

            The Plan immediately fell apart; in that respect, it was quintessentially Cuban.

Play shooting games, cool shooting games online.

            For one thing, the Brothers to the Fucking Rescue never showed up. Every plane that flew over flew away. I shouted myself hoarse, I waved my arms, I paddled due north. Alone in that blue immensity. I peered down at the fish beneath, the sun refracting into the deeps. Far below were galleons, sunken dreams, the waving arms of lost balseros.  The sea, she is immense, I clung to my inner tube as it whirled into troughs so deep it was night at the bottom, then up, up, up, Himalayas of swells, so high it was snowing on top, or maybe it was mist. There were sharks too, sawing through the water, back and forth, as if waiting for the dinner bell. Salt, sun, and rainbows.  Rimed, blinded, dazzled, I huddled on my inner tube, shivering and excited. My name is Ángel Moreno, I whispered, I am a balsero… I thought about my mother, waiting for me in Santiago; she must have been very worried, although I couldn’t believe she’d known they were going to throw me out here like bait.

            I saw a school of marlins, leaping north, and I leapt too, and fell off the inner tube.  "I am coming!" I spluttered. "Jésus! I am coming!"  Then I burst into tears.

            I woke in a becalmed night.  Overhead, a black sky shot full of stars.  Around me, the dark sea was dappled with a flotilla of phosphorescent jellyfish.  A shark bumped! my inner tube.  “Coño!” I swore, kicking at it.  Well, it was only a small shark; perhaps it just wanted to play.  Then I saw a blinking light, and paddled towards it.

            I heard voices, Russian and Spanish.  A dark ship squatted on the sea.  I heard the slapping of the water against the hull, saw flash­lights winking on and off.  There was a snatch of cumbia music, abruptly cut short.  "Quiet, you idiots!" a voice hissed.  I steered towards it.

            "Hello!" I called.  Instantly a bullet seared the night and grazed my inner tube, which began to keen. 

            "Who’s there?" boomed a voice. A searchlight blinded me.

            "It’s a fucking kid."

            "It’s me," I gasped, "Ángel Moreno, from Cuba. My mother, she is dead. Please, where is CNN?"

            Silence.  "Fucking balsero."

            "Sorry, kid, this ain’t no orphanage. Keep paddling."

            "But you shot my inner tube!"

            "Life is tough."

            With a whine, my inner tube turned into a puddle of rubber. I swallowed salt, and came up gasping.  "Please!" I called. "I will drown."

            "Vait a minute," said a Russian voice, "how tall is he?"

            "One hundred thirty centimeters!" I called, gargling seawater.

            "Perfect!"  A rope uncoiled out of the darkness and I pulled myself forwards, until I banged! against a metal hull. 

            "Hey!" I said. The searchlight blinked off, and I found myself next to a submarine, floating on the night.  A hairy paw hauled me onto a deck.

"Sorry, kid," said a pot-bellied Latino in stained underwear. "We thought you were DEA."

            A boat, silent and dark, was moored alongside the sub, and men were transferring bales wrapped in black plastic from the boat and lowering them through anhatch­way painted with a spray of yellow stars on a red flag.  "What’s in those?" I asked.

            "Unicef," the Latino said, and the others laughed.

            "Are we going to Miami?" I said. "I really need to get there."

            "Never mind," said another voice, a Russian. "Vaht do you know about torpedoes?"

            "Everything!" I said. "A torpedo is rum, vodka, cognac, crème de menthe, cucumber, and propane!"

            The Russian smiled at me.  "I like zis kid," he said, and then peed over the side.

            And so I found myself on a Chinese surplus sub, purchased by the Cartel to ship cocaine across the Caribbean, thus avoiding the Cuban navy, which would stop the boats and extort a cut.  Inside, it was like a sewer, dark and sweating, which, because it was Chinese, was two sizes too small for everyone but me.  The ship swarmed with Colombian mobsters but was manned by Russians; the Colombians wore pistols strapped to their hips, the Russians wore military caps. Everyone squeezed through the sub’s tropical innards in their underwear, like pale termites in a nest.

            The Colombians were led by a barrel-chested bullfrog named Ulíses; he had a right arm, a brooding Mestizo, lean and angular, as if carved from spite with a sharp knife.  The Russian crew was led by General Zam-something, who drank vodka out of a canteen.  General Z was puffy-eyed and red-nosed and had once commanded a Soviet Typhoon submarine in the Far East.

            "Two hundred men and twenty-four Sturgeon missiles," he said proudly, offering me a Vienna sausage in the dank nook of the bridge. "Now look at me. Goddamn Gorbachev. Russia, she is za bargain basement of za whole vorld."

            An oily rat darted boldly out and snatched a sausage. One of the Colombians took a shot at it, and the bullet zinged! and ricocheted through the maze of pipes and ladders and everyone ducked.

            "Goddamit, no firing on board!" General Z shouted. He shook his head.  "Vaht a scurvy lot."

            My job was to clean the torpedo tubes, some loaded, and some of which, accord­ing to the General, "zose idiot Colombians" had packed with hashish on a previous run.  I squirreled my way inside a metal tube, and the heady resin went straight to my head, making me dizzy.  General Z was impressed.

            "How old you say you are?" he said, squinting in theng.

            "Seven!"

            He shook his head.  "If Cuba stays Communist," he said, "ze Cubans vill soon be smaller zan za Chinese."

            We were supposed to be quiet on board, so the DEA wouldn’t blow us all to smithereens, but the rusting pipes pinged! and knocked like a percussionist.  Also, the Colombians kept forgetting and playing cumbias.

            "Zis piece of crap is noisier zan a whore vis za clap," the General sighed.

            In the whispery dark, I swung through that sinister jungle gym like a monkey, exploring, sneaking, stealing, although the tension made me nervous.  I caught predatory glances, felt fingers brush against me in the dark, and every time I turned around, it seemed, I saw the Mestizo, staring balefully at me.

            Dizzy, a bit seasick, I slid down a manhole into a foul and close tube lined with narrow berths like coffins, towels draped over them for privacy. I poked my way along, over and under pipes, to see what I could filch. Under an empty bunk, I found an envelope and lifted it; inside, however, was neither drugs nor money, only snapshots of naked children. Suddenly I felt a grip on my shoulder and turned: it was the Mestizo.  His face wore a mandala of black blemishes, like burn marks. He grabbed me roughly. 

            "Angelito!" came a voice behind us.

            It was Orestes, the pot-bellied Colombian who’d fished me out of the sea.  He and the Mestizo stared at each other.  "What’s the matter?" he said.

"My tummy hurts," I said.

Orestes took my hand.  "Come," he said.

We lay in his bunk together and he gave me a little white pill.  "Is this for my tummy?" I said.

"It’s for your heart," he winked, and popped one in his mouth. I chewed mine, but it tasted terrible.  He showed me pictures of his wife and daughters in Barranquilla.  "No sons," he sighed, and lit a cigarette.  Suddenly I sat up.

"I feel funny, Orestes."

"Relax," he said, and wiped my brow.  I felt shaky, and then nauseous, but then my heartd just like a flower, and I burned with love for my mother. 

"Quiero a mi mamá," I whispered.

"Of course you do, Angelito."

"My mother, she is so beautiful!" I said.  "But I am such a bad boy!"

"Hush, Angelito."

“It’s true!” I said. "That’s why she left.  But I’m going to see her soon! I’m going to be very very good, and we’re going to be together!"

I lay there, blinded with love for my mother.

When I woke up, Orestes was gone. I felt clear as an empty bottle, resolved to be very good.  I went to find General Z.

"I need to get to Miami right away," I said. 

"Tut," he said, "make me a mojito." At a little bar of clinking bottles, I crushed the mint carefully between my fingers, and shook it up as quietly as I could. "You are very lucky boy," he slurred, tousling my hair. "I vill show you Vladivostok and St. Petersburg, vee’ll trade coca for black market varheads—"

BOOM! 

The sub juddered so hard I saw double, and there was a terrible noise, as if every screw slipped a notch. 

"Attack!" the General bellowed. "All hands on deck!" 

Everyone ran this way and that and I was knocked about like a pinball.  BOOM!  Terrified, I jumped down a manhole, and ran to find Orestes, but barreled right into the Mestizo. His sunken eyes unpeeled me like a banana, and then he pulled me into a latrine. 

"Orestes!" I screamed.  The Mestizo put his hand over my mouth, his maroon pinga saluting up out of his damp boxers. I bit down hard, tasting blood, and he gawped in an eerie ululating yowl: he had no tongue. Steam shot out from pipes, alarms chitter­ing; from some­where overheard a stream of water poured down on me as I skittered through that labyrinth, the Mestizo right on my ass. 

He cornered me in the torpedo room, and I dove into a tube.

His prehistoric face, purple with rage and desire, filled theng, his long arm clawing at me. I scrabbled away, watched as he jerked off, shot a foam of jism at me, then slammed! the hatch shut.

BOOM BOOM BOOM!  The walls of the tube played a tom-tom on my head as the sub shook from side to side. In total darkness, I felt a great rushing roar through the wall: they had just fired an adjacent torpedo! Then with a whoosh! I was ejected into the blue and bottomless sea.

I came up gasping in a whirl of bubbles just as the sub surfaced.  It was night. There was a huge ship full of soldiers and – happy day! – an American flag.  A search­light picked me out.

"Is that a kid??"

“Please,” I gurgled, "I am Ángel Moreno, from Cuba. Which way is Disney World?" Then I passed out.

…

And so I found myself in DEA custody in Florida. For General Z it meant arrest and deportation, but Orestes told them my story and the agents were sympathetic.  That is, until my uncle Porfi from Miami showed up. He took one look at me, like the leftover trash, and spat. 

"Send his sorry ass back to Cuba," he said.  It was a little setback to the Plan.

See, I hadn’t told El Loco that my uncle Porfi had always said he would strangle me with his bare hands if I ever set foot in Florida. Appar­ent­ly, my mother had filled him in on the many ways I’d broken her heart.  He was my father’s uncle or something, but they didn’t get along, or so I gathered as I sat in his 1979 Coupe on the way to his house in Little Havana, dazzled by the gajillion neon signs of America.

"Useless piece of shit, just like your father," he said, yanking! me down into my seat.  "Don’t think you’re not on the next boat to Cuba."

I remembered what the Beard said he would do to me if I screwed this up.

"Oh please, Uncle Porfi," I said, "don’t you want me to grow up in the land of freedom and cable TV?"

"Shut up, you little delinquent," he snapped. "This ain’t no garbage dump."

"The poor thing," my Aunt Naty said when I got there late at night, "he’s lost his mother."

"He probably killed her," Uncle Porfi said, shrugging off his suspenders.  He threw me a blanket and I curled up on the living room couch.

I am here, Jésus, I whispered, I made it!

I woke up smelling America. It had a delicious aroma: bacon, tobacco, old carpet, hope, endless opportunities. I turned on the TV and helped myself to a cigarette. Aunt Naty almost had an attack. 

"What a filthy habit," she tsk’d, yanking! the cigarette away and setting down a huge plate of breakfast, enough to feed a whole province. Poor Aunt Naty had a forgotten look, like a package that was never delivered, and Uncle Porfi was in a very bad mood that morning.

"Have you looked outside?" she whispered to him.

"Goddamit, how did they find out?" he hissed. 

I peeped out the window and gasped: outside the picket fence of their neat and tiny yard was a huge crowd of reporters with TV cameras. Uncle Porfi jerked the curtains shut.  Then my cousin America came out. 

America! With her red lips and blue lenses and purple nails, she wore earrings like cherries and sunglasses with daisies on them and hats like parasols so that she looked like a tropical drink.  She was named for the Western Hemisphere, she said, and Panama was her navel. She showed me on a map and it was true, she did look like it: big boobs, big butt, tiny waist.  She was glamorous, like a well-fed jinetera, and her bulletproof hair, always a different shade of blonde, was whipped into a frothing confection and sticky with hair spray, like spun sugar.

Uncle Porfi told her to keep me out of sight, but as soon as she saw the cameras, she ran to her room, colored her face, starched her hair, squeezed herself into a too-small top and too-short skirt, snapped! on a flashing Orion of cut-glass jewelry and marched me outside.

FLASH!  The cameras all crowded forward.

America beamed like a VACANCY sign.  "This child’s MOTHER," she announced – ("What was her name?" she whispered. "María," I prompted.) – "MARÍA, sacrificed her life to bring this child to FREEDOM!"

Everyone applauded. FLASH!

"We will raise him as she wanted!" America gushed.

"What about the child’s father in Cuba?" a reporter said.

Twenty microphones pressed forward and America whispered to me my first line as an American.  "My father is Jorge Washington!" I said, and the street burst into applause.

And so I came to live with my new, improved family in Miami, headed by Uncle Porfi and Aunt Naty, who were like worn down pencil stubs.  In Cuba, the people were tired, starved for hope and protein, but in America it was because they had to work, work, work. Uncle Porfi lifted crates at the docks, with his bad back, bad knees, and bad breath; Aunt Naty was a cashier at Super Cake, her feet swollen and knotted like yucca roots.  In Havana, they could have sat around all day playing cards with the Defenders of the Revolution, but Uncle Porfi said that was not a life for a man but a dog.  I wanted to be a good American too, and offered toa mojito stand – always popular – but Aunt Naty said "Dios mío!"

America worked as a dental assistant, which suited her because she said she was naturally personable and liked to converse without interruptions. I shared her party-colored room and followed her around and couldn’t wash off the smell of her vanilla perfume, but I didn’t care because she was so pretty!

The Moreno bungalow filled up with scores of relatives, people I’d never heard of.  There was a roast pig in the backyard and a band and congressmen and lawyers and reporters and famous people like La Vieja, the hundred-year-old salsa singer in blonde wig and platforms who pinched my cheek when I made her a Zombie.  "Azúcar!" she said. A state senator brought me a puppy.

"I hate dogs," I said, and the senator gave me a slippery smile. It was a great party, at least until my Uncle Amado showed up.  He was my mother’s half-brother.  Thin-framed, with his dimples and eyeglasses he looked like a sad version of my mother.  He put his arms around me and sobbed.

"Poor María," he wept, "she was so good, and now she’s dead."

"Oh but she’s not dead, Uncle Amado," I said, feeling terrible, and everyone looked at me.  "I mean, she’s in Heaven," I added.

"That’s right," America said, peeling off a long thin strip of barbecued ribs, "Ángel’s mother is in Heaven, waiting for Cuba to be free."

Uncle Porfi gave me a long thin look, but America squeezed my cheek.  "Make me another drink, papito."

CONTINUED