“My God,” she whispered, shocked. I glanced at her and worried about the beat of silence. My father didn’t answer immediately. If he was feeling anything like the way my mother looked, then it was going to be a quiet program.
Francisco’s voice finally did come down from on high. He sounded calm and amused. “I’m not sure I know what your question is, Ron. I didn’t write that murder and robbery is understandable. I did write that there aren’t revolutions without people being killed. There were lots of killings on both sides. As for these family businesses you mentioned — I don’t know what families you’re talking about. Ninety percent of Cuban assets were owned by foreign corporations. They weren’t mom-and-pop operations. I’ve heard ITT called a lot of things, but never a family business.”
My father’s first cousin, Pancho, taped the broadcast on a reel-to-reel machine. His daughter, Marisa, sent me a copy a few months ago and, listening to my father refute the seemingly endless stream of anti-Castro questions and arguments from the host and his callers, I’m not surprised that I admired my father as much as I did while listening in the station’s waiting room. Francisco was funny, he was full of facts, he told stories that made the Cubans and their struggle real. No matter how alone he seemed in his convictions, no matter how angry his opposition, he sounded serene. I think his perfectly sincere account of Cubans as a people who love American culture, from baseball to movies to rock music, was the most effective. Certainly it made an impression on me since Francisco used me as an example of the contrast between an American boy’s opportunities and a Cuban’s under Batista.
“My son Rafael broke his arm today. He was able to find treatment within a short distance for a modest cost. Under Batista a Cuban peasant boy might have had to travel for miles on foot and could easily have had his arm set incorrectly by an unskilled nurse. Here there are no shortages of doctors, no scarcities of antibiotics in case Rafael’s fracture should infect. When we return to New York this fall Rafael will go to a well-equipped school, a free school, whose teachers and facilities would be the envy of Havana’s most expensive private schools under Batista. The illiteracy rate at the time the revolution triumphed was over ninety percent. The Cuban government has announced a goal of one hundred percent literacy in five years. I spent two days in shacks in the sugarcane fields, shacks with no windows, no desks, just a few hard benches, where people of all ages and sexes were squeezed together as they were taught to read and write. And, after the lesson, everyone, including the teachers, went out to work side by side in the fields, converting the acres of sugarcane — profitable to the United Fruit Company, but unbalanced economically for the Cuban people — to useful crops that can lower their import costs and improve their nutrition. Of course all these wonderful changes would be undone by a U.S. embargo of Cuba. Cuba is a poor country. With our markets closed to them, with all their imports having to come from much farther away than the industrial giant only ninety miles off their shore, that Cuban peasant boy who roots for the Yankees like my son Rafael, who’d like nothing better than to go to the Saturday morning movies at the Loew’s on 175th Street along with all of Rafe’s school friends, may not, in spite of Fidel’s reforms, have enough food, or the antibiotics he needs, or the books to learn from. You say, Ron, that Cuba is an ally of the Soviet Union and therefore our enemy. I’m not sure that’s true. Yet. But it we continue to cut off Cuba from our resources, they’ll have no choice but to be Russia’s friend. Their lives will depend on it.”
My happy life was an accident of geography. I saw myself, poor, my broken arm twisted, walking barefoot across a desert (I pictured lush Cuba as a wasteland) to a shack presided over by a sad-faced nurse who cried out, “I don’t know what I’m doing,” as she wrenched my arm this way and that. Tapeworms crawled into cuts on my feet. I was so badly educated I didn’t have the vocabulary to tell the frantic nurse about my stomachache.
Absurd, no? My Coke was suddenly tasteless. The red velvet seats of Loew’s theater in Washington Heights seemed a monstrosity of waste. Did Francisco have any idea what it meant to associate all the commonplaces of my life with inequity and injustice? And yet what my father said was perfectly true. That poor peasant boy did exist and he still doesn’t have the medicine or food or the learning of his middle-class American equivalent. Of course, thirty years has made a difference — nowadays that deprived child can also be found in New York City. (Please bear in mind, I don’t approve or disapprove of any particular bias as to the solutions of these social problems, including the bias that nothing can be done.)
We left the station in high spirits. By the end of the broadcast, even the hostile radio host seemed won over. There were so many phone calls the producer ran the show for an extra hour. She followed us down the stairs alternately thanking my father and asking how long he would be in Tampa. She wanted to do another broadcast with him. They agreed to be in touch in the morning.
Grandpas Plymouth was alone on the street. It was dark, after ten-thirty, and humid again. Tampa out-of-doors seemed as close as a room with all the windows shut.
We started home, my parents in front, me in back, leaning forward to peer over Francisco’s shoulder. My mother sang his praises. She reminisced over particular rejoinders he had made; she laughed at his jokes; she teared up as she recalled his account of the Cuban peasant woman learning to read at age sixty-eight. She made love to him with her admiration.
We stopped at a light a few blocks from the radio station. We were still in a deserted commercial neighborhood. There was only one other car on the road. Its lights came up behind us, getting brighter than they should, like a big wave set to engulf us. My mother turned toward it. Her features were bleached by the intensity. And then we were hit.
I smacked into the vinyl and tumbled into the ditch of the car floor. I rolled over my cast. In fact it punched me in the stomach. My first thought was that I must have broken it.
I heard furious male voices. There were snatches of obscenities and words in Spanish. Doors opened. My mother shouted, “No, Frank!”
The cast wasn’t damaged. I didn’t move, though. My nose was pressed into the hump that divided the back. I was terrified. Outside something horrible was happening and I was too frightened to look.
I heard my mother scream. It was unlike any sound she had ever made. I raised myself to see. Her dreadful cry had summoned me from my cowardice and would, I’m sure, have summoned any mother’s son.
The impact of the rear-end collision had pushed us completely across the intersection. My mother was on the hood of the Plymouth, her face cut and bleeding. Her dress — I know she looked beautiful and young in it, but I can’t remember its color — had been torn apart down the front. Her bra had also been cut or pulled off. I don’t know about her panties — I assume she had been stripped of them as well. At first I thought her condition had been caused by the accident.
I saw the man in the aviator glasses off to the side. He had my father’s head in his hands. It seemed, in the glare of the shattered lights from both cars, that he was holding Francisco’s decapitated head. Actually, my father was on his knees, bleeding from a head wound caused by the collision. He was conscious but woozy. The man with the aviator glasses had him by the hair, pulling to keep my father’s head up so he would see what his companions were doing to Ruth.
They had thrown her across the hood like a slain deer. Her vulnerable skin trembled in the light of their car. One man climbed up and knelt above her chest, his knees pinning her arms. He urinated on her bloody face. She screamed in pain. I never looked to see what his friend was doing to the bottom half of my mother’s body. These snapshots of what I remember were difficult enough to process.