A bad business, cutting cane. The old man was up with the sun to wait for the workers' bus that took the cutters to a different field every day, and those fields were hot and smoky, burned over the night before so that the earth was steamy underneath your feet and your body turned black from the soot. Heavy work with the machete in the heat and smoke. One slash to cut down the stalk, slash, slash to take off the leaves, and three quick chops to cut the cane into even pieces, each about a meter long. By the end of the day the old man was covered with soot, exhausted, and when he got home he had just enough energy left to clean himself, eat his meal, and smoke a cigarette before going to sleep. Sometimes he smoked that cigarette, or two, or three, sitting outside in front of the bohio with his children gathered around him, and often he would talk to us about sugar. He was a simple man, unschooled, and sugar was all that he knew.
"After the revolution," he would tell us, "Fidel said that it was the sugar that kept our people poor, and that we would have to raise other crops. Well, they tried them, many of them, but always they had to come back to the sugar. Because of the money it can bring, you see? It's a bad thing to be so dependent on a single crop, but that's the way it is. Sugar is Cuba 's blessing, and Cuba 's curse, but let me tell you something, children. It's a hard life cutting cane, but as hard as it is, it was worse before the revolution. We don't have much now, but back then a man like me had nothing."
More than anything else, my father hoped that his sons would not have to work in the fields, that the revolution would bring us something else to do, but it didn't happen that way. One by one, my three older brothers went to cut cane, and for a very short time so did I. Only when they discovered that I was a sensitive was I saved from a life in the fields, although I like to think that I would have found something better than field work in any event. But who knows about those things? So I was eleven years old when I worked in the fields along with my father and brothers, and that was the year that Fidel decreed a ten-million-ton zafra. That was 1970, and in the years before that the sugar crop had never come close to that figure. Five million, six million tons was the absolute top, but in 1969 Fidel announced that the goal for 1970 would be ten, and if you weren't living in Cuba at that time you have no idea how that plan turned the country inside out. More land was cleared, more cane was planted, and people from all over the island were drafted to help in the effort. The goal became a national obsession, I mean there were billboards all over that said, 'What Are You Doing for the Ten Million?' Once the harvest started there was a steady parade of the big shots who came out to the fields to lend a hand, with the TV and the newspaper cameras following them around. I remember Marshal Grechko, the Soviet Minister of Defense, cutting cane, and there were groups from North Vietnam and East Germany. Fidel came, of course, slashing away with his machete for the cameras, but let me tell you this: after the cameras were finished he stayed and cut cane for the rest of the day. It was a magnificent effort, but in the end it failed. There was no ten-million-ton zafra that year, not even nine. Eight and a half was the final figure, and the failure wrecked the country for years to come. But I wasn't around to see the end of it. All I saw was the beginning.
Like I said, it was a national obsession, and I had to be a part of it. I was only eleven, but in Cuba that's close to being a man, and I had been swinging a machete for years. I worked every day in the steamy, sooty fields alongside my father and my brothers, and I was proud to be a part of it. Then, one day in the fields I began to hear the voices, and after that I was crazy for a while.
You know how it is, it's the same with all of us, the voices in your head when you're about eleven, and then the craziness. I stopped being crazy when they took me to the Center in Havana and explained the facts of life to me. The facts of a sensitive's life. They told me what I was, and what I could be, and after that I didn't have to worry about cutting cane. But I never forgot what the fields were like, and I never forgot the stories that my father told us about how it had been before the revolution. The revolution didn't make him rich, but it brought him more than he had ever had before. And now, according to Chavez, someone was stealing it from him. The way I saw it, if Jaime Figueroa was stealing from the state, then he was stealing from my father, and that made me sick.
It also made me boiling mad. It made my face flush and my ears burn; it made me sweat. My passion, you see, my inability to do things by halves. For just that moment I was out of my head with indignation, and if Jaime Figueroa had been standing there before me I would have cut his throat without a quiver.
But it was Patrício Chavez who stood before me, not the other, and again he nodded his approval of my indignation. "Get me the proof," he said again, "and I'll put that thief up against the wall."
"You can count on it," I told him, my voice trembling with emotion, for I was blinded by this passion of mine.
Yes, blinded. So blinded that I forgot for the moment what a devious bastard this Chavez was. So blinded that I did not stop to question what he said. So blinded that I did not bother to tap him.
Yes, we have the same rules that you have. It is forbidden to tap an officer of the DGI without written authorization, but you know how often that rule is broken. We all do it, regularly and without qualms, but this time I didn't. Blinded by my passion, I accepted what he said, and went to prepare for my new assignment.
I should have tapped. If I had, I would have saved myself time and trouble. There was only one thief involved in the operation, and the thief was Patrício Chavez. So I should have tapped, but on the other hand, even if I had tapped him I never would have dreamed that by the end of the year I would have stolen more money from Mendoza and Fitch than Chavez ever had dreamed of.
Crickets chirped as Rafael Canero, aka Julio Ramirez, fell silent. Far away, trucks rumbled over the Interstate, and a faint breeze rattled palm fronds.
Snake said softly, "You bastard."
From the darkness, a surprised Julio asked, "Me?"
"How long were you in Cuba?"
"When?"
"You know when. Then."
"A week, maybe ten days. Just long enough to learn my new cover and get fitted out with new ID."
"And then you went to Miami as Julio Ramirez."
"No, my new name was Jorge Guardado. Julio Ramirez came later."
Snake brushed that aside as unimportant. "But ten days after we played that farewell scene in New York you were back in the States."
"Yes."
"And you never once got in touch with me. Not a note, not a telephone call. Nothing."
"Snake, be reasonable. It's the way that we live. How could I?"
Snake thought about it, and decided to be reasonable. "You couldn't," she admitted. And then, after a moment, "Did you want to?"
"You know the answer to that."
She decided not to press it. "So you turned into a thief."
"In a sense."
"And now you're on the run."
"In a sense. It was a little more complicated than that."
I started work at Mendoza and Fitch in December of 1986, and I was there until October of the following year, which, if you're quick with dates, tells you why I eventually left. I started there just before the new year, and I learned a few things quickly.
I learned, as I had expected, that the intelligence to be gathered from Miami 's exile community was minimal. It was gossip, nothing more; juicy gossip that I faithfully forwarded to Havana every month. If Fidel enjoyed the reports, they at least had entertainment value.