Havana Libre Read online

  Mendoza’s tone is cold, calm, imperative—not pleading, not threatening. He says, “Four men, unarmed, were shot out of the sky last year by Russian-made fighter jets in Castro’s air force because of sinvergüenzas like you. I stood alongside the wives of those pilots at the funerals, weeping.”

  The radio in the hallway blares Radio Mambí. I have told him the number, but he is doubly angry because it was a prepaid voice mail. Now all I have left is José Martí Park. These are the only words I have that might be of value to him, but they are also my only hope, however slim. José Martí Park. I will not say it.

  “They abandoned you,” Mendoza says. He wants something from me—Giro—and all he has gotten is a prepaid voice mail. To know whom Roque was feeding information, the one who in turn conveyed it to Havana, coordinating with others who made the decision to shoot down the planes and kill those four men. This would be a real catch.

  Mendoza repeats, “¿Quién es Giro?”

  He waits for a reply, but I look at the floor. Mendoza is not a professional interrogator. Like a dull knife, this can be more dangerous. He is a new and lazy jailer, one who believes that deprivation and dehydration will prevail. He tells the Riveras, “Bring him back to his air-conditioned studio.”

  When they return me to the bathroom and the stench of hot feces, the sun is just passing out of my window zone and the temperature is 160. I breathe through the fabric of what’s left of my shirt, but the stench is unbearable. I gag in the fetid air, dry-heaving through painful convulsions of my throat and abdomen. A recorder in a phone booth. I was not careful. The bathroom a prison cell. The bedroom an interrogation chamber.

  Who is Giro? What does Mendoza mean by wasp? Five years and what, roughly five weeks? That is how long it has been since the first time I lost my freedom. I said I would not let them lock me up again. I meant anybody, ever. Now, half a decade later, I find myself in this ridiculous situation. Blame Pérez and Caballero? No. Blame some Salvadoran asshole willing to blow people up for $1,500? Yes, but not as much as my father and these other moneyed motherfuckers. Blame myself. Privación de libertad. Deprivation of liberty—this is what the Cuban penal code calls incarceration. But here I cannot count on the slightest leniency I might receive from even Cuba’s muddled justice system.

  I concentrate on my biggest problem, despite its insolubility: I am trapped. I am locked in, and the only door is guarded beyond that. Slow starvation.

  A much graver concern is rapid dehydration. In the first eighteen hours, I will lose nearly two liters of water and two kilograms of body mass. The heat and thirst are already disrupting my metabolic processes. And the discomfort caused by hypernatremia, loss of free water, and the attendant excess concentration of salt is considerable. Gout. Weighing sixty-three kilos, I could lose almost eight relatively safely. It would be uncomfortable. It would be very uncomfortable. But it would not be lethal. I would begin to break down at 15 percent. But the greater risk, I know, is hypovolemia: loss of blood volume, particularly plasma, could be critical.

  The effects of the physical discomfort combined with dehydration create an agony like that of the acute arthritis sufferer: every inch of joint and muscle saturated with uric acid, the onset of gout. I languish on my left side, bent double, arms wrenched behind my back. Despite the agony of the position, the soreness throughout my body prevents me from moving.

  Mercedes is probably asleep in the basement at the Havana Libre. Or with the baby in her belly in the water on the beach in Miramar. She has taken herself on a walk after her shift to cool down. Regardless, she could have heard the news by now: I did not show up at the conference. Maybe I have requested residency. Maybe I have defected.

  Either she is brushing it off and saying, El egoismo: just another refugee doctor who thought he deserved better than other Cubans. Or she is thinking what I must have been thinking when I told her goodbye and saying to herself, Ese hijo de puta. Me dijo que me iba a ayudar. Él se hizo el que quería ayudarme a mi con el niño. Con esos ojos con que me dijo adiós. Me hirió a propósito. Me engañó. He told me he would help me. He pretended he wanted to take care of me and my baby. He said it with his eyes when he said goodbye. He hurt me on purpose.

  A virtuous voice inside me says, I hope she believes it was just egoism, but if she does, and if I die here, then what is left of me? I am nothing. An iron hand seems to have nailed me to the spot where I stood last night. I am motionless with my eyes fixed on the window. I stand and stare at it. The moon moves slowly, blurily behind the frosted glass. I hum verses of “Guantanamera” to mark the time. I am an honest man . . . And before I die . . . Verses from my soul . . .

  VIERNES, 12 SEPTIEMBRE

  Mercedes

  She has made a few dollars in tips in her first week on the job, and so Mercedes decides she can take a little bit of her savings—the pesos, not the dollars—and treat herself to ice cream. She crosses the street from the hotel to El Coppelia and sees the famous Cine Yara on the other corner. Tourists have their own entrance. Mercedes gets in line with the Cubans.

  Across Calle 23 people line up for the guaguas going all across Havana. The camellos go up and down la Rampa. Blowing their air horns and coughing exhaust, they maneuver around the taxis and bici-taxis. The couple in front assure her that today it is a short line: an hour at most. She tells them it is her first time and the woman explains, “The glasses of water, plates, and spoons are dirty and smell like rotten milk, but don’t complain! They’ll serve you even more slowly.”

  There’s a Coppelia in Pinar del Rio too, but it’s much smaller compared to the one in Havana, which is shaped like un gran OVNI and at least it still sells ice cream. She wishes she had a friend to stand in line with, but that will happen in time. When the doctor returns from his trip she will ask him to join her for her October ice cream. In the meantime, she knows she is not alone.

  The attendant in charge of distributing people to tables as they become available calls, “Una persona sola,” and she is seated on the upstairs level at a table of hyperactive teenagers who pay no attention to her.

  Clutching the pesos in her handkerchief, she looks around at her surroundings and despite herself thinks, I expected it to be prettier. She closes her eyes and tries to picture how pretty it was before everything began to fall apart.

  She is trying to save for her baby, so she calculates what she might order for as little as possible to treat herself. How many flavors are available? What’s the name for a bowl with just one scoop, as opposed to una ensalada?

  The server’s shirt is dingy white and his black pants are stained. He is tired and overworked. All the good servers are on the tourist side where tips are in dollars. He tells her it is seven pesos for una ensalada of five scoops, otherwise 1.50 per bola. The only flavor is vanilla. She orders one scoop of vanilla.

  While she waits, she looks across the street at the Havana Libre, her place of employment, and it makes her feel good for herself and for her child. It is a symbol of strength and dependability, and if she can hold onto the job and manage to make her way into housekeeping, she might be able to get into her own place by the time the baby arrives. She suddenly feels the exhaustion of her transformation. Had she needed to make a difficult choice? Yes. Did it involve what might be seen as a betrayal? Maybe. She was not able to conceive it otherwise. It was a sacrifice for the well-being of the child. If she had not been in love with him once, she would not be here now. If he had not become abusive and as such unrecognizable from the man she once loved, she could not have made the decision. But that did not mean that she couldn’t tell her daughter someday about her father. She could tell her about the one that her mother had loved.

  It takes thirty minutes for her scoop to arrive and she gives the server the money. There is no paper or ink for him to write the check. It is bad ice cream, very watery, and the bola has a hole on the inside, but to Mercedes it is refreshing and delicious. This is vanilla, she tells her baby, ice cream the flavor of vanilla.
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br />   MIAMI: THE ROOM

  I do not hear Yuyo enter. He taps me on the shoulder and I shudder alert.

  “Have you not slept?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

  “Are you not hungry?”

  “I do not know.” I know it would be futile to plead for water, and my head hurts too much to speak.

  Yuyo grabs my underarms and helps me up. “Woo! It really stinks in here, man!” He drags me into the bedroom and props me up in the metal folding chair. The relative dimness is a balm to my eyes, but my sight is troubled with bursts of red fireworks. The men, three of them, are blurry blotches, and I realize my father is still not here. I close my eyes to preserve whatever moisture remains in them, but my parched lips are stuck painfully open, exposing my swollen tongue to the bone-dry room, and when I try to close my mouth the blistered skin at the corners splits open.

  I am laughing to myself. Mendoza looks at me strangely, which gives me a slight twinge of hope that these are not such bad men, because I have to believe he has not done this before if he has not seen someone get hysterical with heat exhaustion and dehydration, and anyway, how am I to stop raving long enough to explain that I once saw Scarface, and I keep laughing at what an apt scene that was of Pacino handcuffed to the shower rod. Of course: the bathroom is a perfect place to torture and butcher your captive. Just turn up the volume on the TV in the adjoining room as loud as it will go.

  “Who is Giro?” Sore, swollen eyes cannot see against the harsh light, but I know from the voice that it is Mendoza. “How many more wasps?”

  “Leave me alone!” I shout this to offer something besides José Martí Park. The one thing I cannot say, my only thread of hope. If I do ever get out of here, it’s my only way back to Cuba. I could tell them about Pérez. I could tell them about Caballero. I probably would if they only asked me, just to be able to say something, to give them something to cut off the misery of repetition. Who is Giro? How many wasps? I don’t know.

  Mendoza has me now, but I have obtained the objective. I take solace in that, and I believe I might make it through whatever deprivation Mendoza has in mind. Even as I absorb the grim situation, I remember: I did it. I completed my mission. Havana is safe. And it gives me strength. Focus on this through the heat and dehydration. Corazón, hombre. Have heart.

  Yuyo comes up from the store with a fresh roll of duct tape. He removes the plastic and hands the roll to Carlos, and then Yuyo takes my right arm, pressing it into the arm of the chair with all his weight. Carlos unwraps the end of the tape with his teeth. Crushing my hand, he unrolls the tape four turns, binding my wrists to the arm of the chair. He is quick and clumsy, though I do not resist because it is Carlos. I am disgusted with myself but glad that he has not hit me. He repeats the process on my right arm. Mendoza tells the Rivera boys to turn up the radio in the hall and close the door behind them, and after they do he removes something from a plastic bag in his pants pocket.

  He holds it in the palm of his hand for me to see: a little rubber ball of the size used by physical therapists. “I want you to feel this.” He takes the ball and he rolls it over my bare arms above the restraints. It is soft like clay, smooth and warm from being in his pocket, and smells like motor oil. “Hit it with a hammer? Nothing happens. It can be shot with bullets, microwaved, or even set on fire—nothing. But zap it with a little electrical charge from a small battery . . . Boom!” He rolls the ball across my bare shoulders and continues low and soothing, “Do you feel it? That is all it took Posada to blow the Copacabana lobby to hell.”

  Mendoza watches the realization come over me and I see a ghost of a grin. This thing, the size of an egg, killed the Italian and injured all the others.

  “It would cause an airplane to disintegrate in midair, or it could explode at the end of a flight, the minute it taxis to the terminal building at José Martí Airport. Right? Maybe what keeps you from telling me what I want to know is that you still think there is something you can do. I have some bad news for you: the information you relayed to Havana was false.”

  “¿Cómo?” I rasp.

  “We identified a target with more potential for the other Salvadoran. What you saw, what you reported to your masters, was actually a snippet of a rejected plan. Now the wasps are swarming to José Martí, but it is not happening on the 26th, and it will not be at the airport. A hotel in Havana, thirty floors, three of them below a plinth that is at grade on the north side. And it will happen mañana.”

  I am too dazed to make sense of his meaning and I seize on the word mañana, the most beautiful word in the Spanish language, which resonates in the misery of my captivity. “Tomorrow?”

  “The 15th, shortly after dawn.” He rolls the ball up my naked back. “I want you to understand which hotel I speak of. It underwent a renovation recently, and one of our friends in Havana who worked construction on the project sent us some photographs of the architect’s report. He pointed out that the steep incline of the substructure below the plinth makes the building vulnerable to collapse if the two main structural supports are compromised. My masterstroke.”

  I let out a groan. “Havana Libre.”

  “It will fall like a domino.” He presses the C-4 firmly into the base of my neck, at the top of the spinal column where the cervical vertebrae meet the skull. “Two charges about this size, set to go off simultaneously, at two junctures of steel beams in the basement. It was a marvel of its time, and its Achilles’ heel is just two supports beneath the plinth. Take those out, and every floor, every room, will collapse to the north with approximately five hundred sleeping tourists. Fidel’s infamous private floor will be in the basement, and thirty stories of steel and concrete will decimate the surrounding neighborhood: among Cubans, another 750 to 1,000 casualties are anticipated.” Now Mendoza smiles. “Look on the bright side: most of the victims will die in their sleep, or at least half-asleep. There is nothing else you can do but tell us everything you know about Giro, and the other avispas, and maybe save your own skin.” He pockets the putty and opens the door. “Take him back to his cooler.”

  For the last hour before dark, the bathroom temperature reaches 170 degrees.

  SÁBADO, 13 SEPTIEMBRE

  The Tourist

  He walks down the hall to the door marked Servicio, the stained shirt draped over his backpack. The service stairwell is lit not with decorative fixtures like up on the main floors, but with a single bulb behind an institutional cage. He notes that it is the kind of light casing that makes the bulb tamper-proof in the type of habitat where you cannot trust the residents not to steal. The hotel’s proprietors do not even trust their own employees not to steal a lightbulb: no wonder the service is so meager and skittish. He has noticed it not just here, but in the restaurants and nightclubs as well. Lots of señor and en qué le puedo servir and a su orden, but when he catches them thinking he’s not looking, he sees the avarice and fear of abused dogs who are desperate for the merest rations. And this is supposed to be one of the country’s finer hotels!

  As he descends the stairs he knows that it would normally be unadvisable to think about staying in the facility that is the target, but in this case it makes more sense to assume the risk for the better development of the plan. As a guest, he can bumble about conspicuously and if caught claim ignorance. He is lost. He needs service. He is looking for something in the wrong place. If necessary, he can intimidate anyone who finds his behavior suspicious by affecting the disposition of an irate customer and exhibiting the usual signs of a burgeoning complaint: ¿Cómo te llamas? ¿Hace cuánto trabajas aquí? ¿Quién es el manager?

  He opens the door to the service basement and peeks down the hall. He waits until a pair of housekeepers disappear into their dormitory, and before anyone else emerges he makes his way down the hall to the door that says, Sólo Empleados. He rolls the shirt up lengthwise, draping it over his shoulders like a scarf, and takes out a key that he got from the recruiter in San Salvador. He unlocks the door and steps
inside to the semidarkness, reaching into his backpack and slowly pulling on a pair of gloves.

  When he is finished scouting, he returns to the service door and opens it a crack to listen. There are no noises, not even a footfall. He takes the shirt from around his shoulders, holding it in his hands along with the empty backpack, and steps out into the hush.

  The moment the service door clicks behind him, a housekeeper emerges from the dormitory. She starts, surprised to see him, and catches her breath to say clearly, firmly, and with much deference, “¿Lo puedo ayudar en algo?”

  “Ahí estás,” he spouts. “I need this shirt laundered right away. A terrible stain . . .”

  “I’ll do my best to get it out. What room are you staying in?”

  “Actually, never mind, it’s ruined now. Too late.” He pushes through the stairwell doors and rushes up the steps.

  MIAMI: THE ROOM

  At sunset my father enters the room. He is not drunk. It is one of the few times since I first met him last week at the Habana Vieja restaurant that he does not appear hungover or drunk. Carlos turns down Radio Mambí to medium-loud and listens in the doorway. Anything I say, he will tell Mendoza. They want to know if I will tell my father anything. I know it is Sunday because I can hear the church bells.

  My father stares at me coldly. It was he who betrayed me, and yet he thinks it is the other way around. I am a nuisance who showed up in his life uninvited. The only compensation may be if they get an answer out of me. Who is Giro? My father says calmly, “I am going to Tampa for a few days. I am going to speak with the American doctor and explain how you defected and chose not to go to the conference. Y quiero que sepas algo antes de irme.” I want to tell you something before I leave.

  Half-lucid, I hear the implied meaning: he wants to say something now because I might not be here when he gets back.