False Dawn

23

Who besides the government buys Detroit’s full-size, four-door sedans with blackwalls? That’s what I wondered as we rolled out of the Justice Building parking lot, neatly avoiding a demonstration by Liberty City residents against the Palestinian owners of the area’s convenience stores. A federal marshal drove the first car, a navy-blue Plymouth. His passenger was an FBI agent with round glasses and an advanced degree in art history. We were next in line, Socolow driving his county-owned car, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. I rode shotgun; Lourdes Soto and her father sat in back. Behind us, another federal marshal drove a CIA agent, an assistant to an undersecretary from the State Department, and someone from the Justice Department who wouldn’t give his name and said he wasn’t really here. Your tax dollars at work.

I don’t know why we needed a caravan. Best I could figure, no one would assassinate me on the Don Shula Expressway. The only threat came from a skinny, barefoot guy who cursed in Creole when Socolow wouldn’t let him clean our windshield at a traffic light on LeJeune Road. As we turned into the airport, I couldn’t help asking, “Anybody want to tell me where we’re going?”

“You’ll find out soon enough, Jakie,” Socolow said.

Ah, a quiz. They told me to pick up my passport along with my duffel bag, so I already knew we weren’t going to Disney World. “They speak English there?”

“About as much as on Flagler Street downtown.” Socolow kept his eyes on the road.

“In that case, I’ll need an interpreter.”

From the back seat, Lourdes said, “That’s why I’m along, Jake.”

Okay, a Spanish-speaking country. If it had been ancient Rome, Charlie Riggs would have drawn the assignment. “Never been to Costa Rica,” I ventured. “Hear the fishing’s great.”

Socolow cranked down his window-no power accessories for the cost-conscious agencies-and flipped his cigarette butt onto the asphalt. “You’re the one who’s fishing, Jake.”

“So tell me, already. You can’t just shanghai me.”

“You tell me, Jake. Where would you go if you had a few billion dollars’ worth of stolen goods to sell, and you knew that every civilized country in the world would imprison you or extradite you?”

“I don’t know. Some outlaw nation. Libya, maybe.”

“Qaddafi may not take kindly to an ex-CIA agent, even for a hundred-million-dollar tip. And Allied jets might find you with a smart bomb.”

“North Korea?”

The first car pulled off the outgoing-flights road and stopped in front of a chain-link fence. The driver showed identification to a uniformed guard, who swung open a gate and let our parade of Plymouths onto the tarmac.

“Too cold. Besides, if Moscow has any influence left in Pyongyang, you might lose your little cache of goodies as well as your head. Think about it, Jake. Somewhere neither the Ruskies nor the Yanks can reach.”

“Brooklyn,” I said.

The lead car stopped in front of a DC-9 that was being refueled. Vista Air was painted on the fuselage. It meant nothing to me.

“Senor Lassiter,” Soto said from behind me, “on the Malecon, there is a billboard which says, ‘ Esta tierra es cien por ciento Cubana.’”

Now what was he talking about?

Soto went on: “It is a lie, of course. It would be more correct to say that the land is one hundred percent Fidel. He no longer has the Russians to prop him up. Cuba is in the period of Zero Option, complete self-sufficiency. And the country cannot do it. Other than the diplotienda stores for foreigners, there is no clothing to buy, little food to eat. They ration bread, eighty grams a person a day. Even eggs, ironically called salvadores, saviors, are scarce. Castro, too, is like an egg.” He turned toward his daughter. “ Como se llama el cuento infantile? ”

“Humpty Dumpty,” she said.

“ Si, Humpty Dumpty is ready to fall. But several hundred million dollars, perhaps a billion, can get him through this time of crisis. Your State Department has always underestimated Fidel. They sneer at him for continuing to wear his fatigues. I personally heard one of the under secretaries say Fidel looked like an aging bellboy in that uniform. Have any of your bureaucrats lived in the mountains and fought guerrilla warfare?”

I figured some have wintered at Aspen and skied Buttermilk, but that probably didn’t count. “So you have a certain grudging admiration for Castro, even after what he’s done to you.”

“What I have is disgust for your foreign policy. You Americans believed that the Embargo Act and the Assets Control Regulations would bring Castro to his knees. Instead, you drove him to Moscow, and now, you force him to stand on his own feet. The signs in Havana, ‘ Socialismo o muerte,’ are not just slogans to Castro. They are his reason for living. But there is an even more important sign these days: ‘ Patria o muerte.’ Fatherland or death. It is the crucial time for the survival of the regime. Even now, they are restoring hotels and building new ones in partnership with European companies. The Pan Am games brought thousands of turistas, and Europeans are beginning to flock to Cuba for cheap holidays. Japanese companies are preparing joint ventures with the Cuban government in biotechnology and medical supplies. There are ongoing ventures with twenty-nine countries. Cuba has opened its doors to foreign investment. And most important of all, Cuba’s Union del Petroleo has begun to explore oil reserves off the north coast in a venture with a French consortium. It is expected to yield a major strike. Still, those new ventures take time, years for new hotels and factories to be built, even longer to drill for oil. Fidel needs hard currency now.”

I refrained from thanking Soto for the lesson in geopolitics. We were getting out of the car when I turned to him and asked, “Very interesting, but what’s that got to do with Foley and the stolen art?”

Even as I said it, I knew the answer. I’m like that sometimes. The information reaches my brain a split second after the foot lodges in the mouth.

Abe Socolow was looking at me as if he doubted I could change a buck into four quarters. “Hey, Jakie, where did Robert Vesco go after stealing a couple hundred million dollars? Where is it warm and you can pick coconuts from the trees and senoritas from the streets? Where can you drink the best rum and smoke the best cigars?”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Cuba. We’re going to Cuba.”

T he passengers were mostly exilado s visiting ailing grandparents in Cuba. A few Cuban citizens lucky enough to get visas were returning home after visiting relatives here. The woman in the row ahead of me wore three pairs of socks, men’s shoes, a winter coat, and enough costume jewelry to stock a small shop. Soto explained there was a forty-four-pound limit on luggage that Cuban citizens could take home. Other than the families, there were the three of us: an ex-political prisoner turned CIA informer, a lady PI with jet black hair and dark liquid eyes, and me, an overgrown ex-jock turned mouthpiece who was always a step too slow.

It was a forty-minute flight. Just like going to Orlando, but the destination bore less a resemblance to the Magic Kingdom than to the Evil Empire, as Ronald Reagan, that old Cold Warrior, once called the now defunct Soviet Union. The customs inspector looked hard at the visas provided by our pals in the caravan, looked hard at us, then let us in.

We squeezed into an avocado-colored Lada taxicab that fishtailed through the wet streets of Havana. The radio played salsa, and in the back seat, Lourdes moved her hips to the music until we were touching. The air was hot and humid as we drove along the Malecon, the wide boulevard that runs along the shoreline. Youngsters carried truck-tire inner tubes on their shoulders toward the beach. I wondered if they were going for a swim, or trying to cross the Florida Straits to a new world. We passed the United States Interests Section where the windows overlook a huge billboard with a cartoon Uncle Sam growling toward a rifletoting Cuban who shouts, “ Senores imperialistas, no les tenemos absolutamente ningun miedo. ”

“It is true,” Soto said, looking at the sign and smiling, “the Cubans have absolutely no fear of the United States. The irony is that they fear their own leader. They are afraid to protest the intolerable living conditions, the human rights abuses. But they know how the West lives. Their televisions pick up the Miami channels. They listen to Radio Marti. And yet, it must get even worse for them to pick up stones and hurl them at the barricades. It must become a situation of total hopelessness for the Army to turn against Fidel.”

The sun was setting, casting a pink glow over the peeling, pockmarked buildings of Habana Viejo. Brakes squealing, the Lada stopped in front of the Inglaterra Hotel in Old Havana. After we got out, I said, “If it happened in Romania…”

“ Si, Senor Lassiter, we are at the precipice of history in this country. It can go either way, and that is why our mission is so important.”

The old hotel had a faintly baroque look with curved dramatic lines, and a Spanish flair for wrought-iron railings and paie stucco. We checked in and gathered in a restaurant with a dark wooden bar and a polished tile floor. Around us, a group of German tourists noisily drank their Cuban beer. Lourdes ordered three mojitos, a sweet drink of rum, soda, sugar, and fresh mint leaves. Above the din of the tourists was the beating of drums from an adjacent show bar where an Afro-Cuban dance show was underway.

After the second round of drinks, Soto began talking. “I was with Fidel at the University of Havana when he ran for student office. I was with him on July twenty-sixth, 1953, in the attack on the Moncada military barracks. They threw us both in prison.”

I studied Soto’s lined face, his sad eyes. His mind seemed elsewhere. In the mountains maybe, leading the guerrillas. In prison, perhaps.

“Fidel was so idealistic,” he said.

Lourdes patted his hand. “You both were, Papi.” She was wearing a black cotton mini with a matching sweater jacket almost as long as her skirt. Under the cocktail table, she had kicked off her sandals and was stroking my leg with the ball of her foot.

Soto drained his sweet minty drink and declined a third, asking the waiter for a beer. “We took Havana on New Year’s Eve, December thirty-first, 1958, firing our weapons into the air, celebrating the new year and a new Cuba, the coward Batista fleeing with his jewels. He was a pig who sold out the country to the Americans who wanted nothing more than a place for sun, rum, and sex.”

Three of the four essentials of life, I thought, figuring football wasn’t that popular on the crocodile-shaped island.

Soto’s eyes were moist. He was staring into the past. I tried to imagine what it was like for the proud revolutionary, arm in arm with his friend Fidel, both brimming with the vigor of youth, the promise of the future. Then something came to me. “New Year’s Eve,” I murmured. “Twelve, thirty-one, fifty-eight. That’s the combination for the lock on your studio.”

Soto looked at me and smiled. “It was the high point of my life, a day to remember para siempre.”

After that it was all downhill, I thought. But where else is there to go after reaching the peak? Maybe now, after all these years, having sacrificed his body to a revolution and then a counterrevolution, this was his way of climbing the mountain again. Bring down the last revolutionary, and let him know it was you from so long ago. To the rest of us, Castro was titanic, one of the century’s legendary figures. A monster to some, a visionary to others, either way his impact would be stamped in the history books forever. But to Severo Soto, he was something else. Soto knew Fidel before the whiskers and the fatigues. Two sharp-witted youths quick of gait and strong of limb. Their future was forever, their potential infinite. But Fidel was a boyhood confederate turned archenemy. With Soto, I thought uncomfortably, it wasn’t political, it was personal.

After one more drink, we settled into our rooms. My window looked out over Old Havana, and I watched as ancient buses, crammed with workers, belched black smoke into the early evening air. Gas rationing had emptied the streets of cars, but thousands of bicycles streamed each way on the boulevard in front of the hotel. The room was spacious and neat, and the plumbing worked, though not without whining about it. Later, I joined Severo Soto and his daughter in the dining room downstairs.

Over a dinner of calabaza soup and paella with giant shrimp, Soto kept talking, and Lourdes resumed stroking my leg. The latter impaired my ability to fully appreciate the former.

“Your State Department, what geniuses they think they are. Estupido! They thought Fidel could be forced to change, so they gave orders. Do this, do that. Don’t fraternize with the Russians. Like a man who stupidly mistrusts his wife, the U.S. drove Cuba to another man.”

Later, after sweet rice pudding served in half a coconut shell, we had cafe Cubano. Soto was still talking. “And what has the embargo accomplished? Has it brought Fidel crying to Washington? No, it has made him more resolute, even as the country has sunk into poverty. The Cuban people watch the Americans sell wheat to the Russians, even before reforms, and give Favored Nation status to the Chinese who crush students with tanks. So why does Los Estados Unidos refuse to sell pickup trucks to a country ninety miles away, or buy its sugar? Does this make sense?”

“Papi, do you think Jake is interested in all of that?”

He seemed to consider the question. “No. Like most Americans, he surely is not interested in the arrogance of his own government. For over thirty years, the American leaders lectured Cuba: Don’t you dare follow the Soviets. Now, all of a sudden, they point to Moscow and say: Now, follow their example. Liberalize. Hold elections. Embrace capitalism. Do as the Russians do. Don’t you find that curious?”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “You’re against American interference. You’re against Castro. You were against Batista, so what are you for? What’s the answer to Cuba’s problems? What is its future?”

He drained the last of his cafe Cubano. “When we succeed here, Senor Lassiter, you will know the answer to those questions.”

Soto stood and bid us both good night. He pecked Lourdes on the cheek and slapped my shoulder, then headed for the elevator.

“What did your father mean by that?”

She shrugged, then took my right hand in both of hers. The look in her eyes said that political talk was out.

“Lourdes, tell me. What’s your father’s agenda?”

“Whatever the CIA tells him to do.”

“I don’t buy that. I doubt your father’s ever done what he’s been told.”

She smiled and tickled my palm with a red, sculpted fingernail. “Don’t listen to an old man prattle on about how he would have changed the world. Maybe he would have, but he spent the better part of his life locked up in Combinado del Este. I love my father and wouldn’t say this to his face, but now he’s an errand boy for Washington. He’s to accompany you as a representative of U.S. interests in any negotiations with Foley. But he has no authority. He will merely transmit messages back and forth between here and his superiors.”

With that, she leaned closer, put her hand behind my head, and pulled me to her. Her lips touched mine. I tasted the sweetness of the sugary dessert mixed with her warm breath.

“My room has a view of the Capitolo,” I said.

I was stretched out on my back on the lumpy bed, watching the breeze swirl the lacy curtains into the room. Lourdes was sleeping, her head on my chest, purring contentedly, when the phone rang. It had a jarring, metallic twang that startled me. Lourdes stirred as I reached for the receiver.

“Hello, Lassiter,” Robert Foley said. “ Bienvenidos a Cuba. ”