Lourdes’s mother didn’t know if her husband was dead or alive. Then one day Severo Soto was picked up by a Coast Guard cutter, drifting north on a raft of inner tubes in the Gulf Stream due east of the Fontainebleau Hotel. It had taken four years to claw and chew through a limestone wall in his cell. His teeth were reduced to nubs, but he clambered through an eighteen-inch hole and made his way to the sea.
When Soto showed up again on Calle Ocho, Lourdes was five years old and did not know her father. Her mother worked as a seamstress. Before long, Soto was gone again, leading Alpha 66 on its fools’ mission to stir up an anti-Castro rebellion. Captured in the Escambray mountains with grenades and automatic weapons, he was again imprisoned, the most famous of the plantados, the political prisoners.
When he was finally released and joined his family a final time in Miami, Soto was a legendary hero in Little Havana. Cuban millionaires, burdened by their guilt and awed by Soto’s steely determination, set him up in the shipping industry. With business funneled his way, it did not take long for him to prosper.
“You know the stories of our exilado s,” he told me. “The lawyers who spoke no English and began here pushing brooms in your banks…”
“Then ended up owning the banks,” I added.
He nodded. “The Cubans are an industrious people. But dreamers, too. We dream of a Cuba Libre.”
I didn’t think he meant a rum and Coke.
“Papi is president of the Cuban Freedom Foundation,” Lourdes said. I knew that from the newspaper. The Foundation was a middle-of-the-road organization, not as liberal as those dialogueros who would begin negotiations with Castro, not as fanatic as those Omega Sevens who would stick nitroglycerine in Fidel’s cigar if they could. “If Castro falls…” Lourdes caught her father’s sharp glance. “ When Castro falls, the Foundation will likely be installed as the first free government in Cuba. Since Papi is president of the Foundation…”
Soto dismissed the idea with a modest wave of his hand. “It will not be a position to be coveted, Mr. Lassiter. Cuba is in a state of complete economic collapse. The country faces what Fidel calls the zero option, now that the Russians can no longer furnish sufficient fuel and food. All consumer goods are rationed. So many of the industrious people have escaped the island, who is there left to rebuild? My friends all vow they will return. But will they? Like me, they are old men. And what of their children? Are they ready to forgo their shopping malls and their cable TV? I assure you, the president of a free Cuba will have his hands full.”
Soto sipped the rest of his cafe Cubano, then pushed his iron chair away from the iron table. When he stood, I figured it was time for me to go, but he didn’t seem in a hurry.
“I am proud of what I have accomplished here, Mr. Lassiter. And I will keep my vow to return to a free Cuba. But on my own terms and in my own way. The Cuba of my past is gone forever. The job of rebuilding will be a massive undertaking.”
“Our government will surely help,” I said.
He scowled. “We cannot base our recovery on American largesse. The politics are too uncertain. Who is to say who will control the White House and the Congress when the time comes? Who can forget the treachery at the Bay of Pigs? The Americans can never be counted on. They have allowed the butcher to remain in power for more than thirty years. We must be self-sufficient and prepare for every eventuality.”
With that he motioned toward the loggia and we began circling the house once again, this time with Soto leading the way. Before we turned the corner, he stopped and pointed to a small freestanding building in the shade of two live oak trees. At one time it would have been maid’s quarters. “Would you like to see my study?” he asked.
“Papi,” Lourdes moaned. “Mr. Lassiter is a busy man.”
Papi didn’t care. “Indulge an old man. I want to show your friend something of beauty besides my only daughter.”
The building was a one-story wooden box with pink Bahama shutters. Soto fished in his pocket and produced a key ring. It took three keys to unlock the door and a three-number combination to turn off the panel alarm inside the door.
Twelve, thirty-one, fifty-eight.
I don’t know why I watched him do that and immediately committed it to memory. Maybe it was something about the number. Or maybe I was a cat burglar in another life.
It was just one room, dark and cool. An old window air conditioner wheezed in the corner. A brown leather chair, its hide cracked, sat at a mahogany desk. A crystal decanter of cigars was perched on a matching credenza. The desk was cluttered with papers and photographs in brass frames. One was in black and white, a much younger Severo Soto and a slender, pale woman with full lips who had been kind enough to bequeath her complexion to her daughter. Next to it was a color shot of a teenage Lourdes in what looked like a prom dress. Her hair was longer, her smile innocent and hopeful.
“My quince party,” she said, catching me spying.
“Over here,” Soto said. He flipped on a light switch and pointed toward the wall facing the desk.
It was an oil painting of a nude man, practically featureless, bent over a nude woman on all fours, who was trying to crawl away. The man’s hands were large and grasping, the woman’s head bent in shame. The colors were vivid, the grass a deep green that seemed to stain the woman’s bare feet, the sea a rich blue. “Do you know much about art?”
No, I thought, but I’m learning. I shook my head.
“What does the painting say to you?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It’s very powerful. Almost frightening in a way. I just don’t know enough to judge its quality.”
“It is a very well-known work, Mr. Lassiter. One of my favorites, in fact, by-”
“Papi!” Lourdes practically stomped her foot. “It is not like you presumir.”
“Forgive me. I am indiscreto, and I embarrass my daughter.” Severo Soto stared hard into the canvas. “What is important is the art itself, what it says, what we can learn from it. To me, the man in the painting is Russia. The woman is Cuba. And every day of my life, Mr. Lassiter, I force myself to watch what he is about to do.”
8
The ramshackle building sagged in the middle and slouched on weathered pilings in the soft earth alongside an Everglades canal. An aging frump without makeup or girdle, Mississippi Jack’s was jammed with workers from the limestone pits, an Anglo-Hispanic-black crew that may have lived in segregated neighborhoods but drank more or less together in a place where you could feel, and occasionally hear, the dynamite blasts from the nearby rock pit.
I had pulled my ancient but amiable convertible into the muddy parking lot and found a spot next to an oversize Dodge Ram pickup that was hauling an airboat. I wore old jeans, boots, and a shirt that celebrated the joys of eating oysters raw.
The “L” in the neon Schlitz sign was dark and had been for as long as anyone could remember. Faded photos of the winners of the latest turkey shoot hung haphazardly inside the door. The jukebox rumbled with “Honky Tonk Woman” followed by “If It Don’t Come Easy.” Fishing corks plugged bullet holes in one wall and the hide of a sixteen-foot alligator decorated another. There was one pool table, the green felt stained from decades of spilled beer. The waitresses were sturdy sedans no longer on warranty and wore jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts tied around ample waists. The bartender paid off winners of a stud poker video game with two six-packs or a sawbuck-take your choice-and if the boys from the state beverage commission didn’t like it, screw them.
The bongs and clangs of a pinball machine competed with the twang from the jukebox. The voices were husky southern drawls, but pockets of the room erupted in occasional bursts of rapid-fire Spanish and inner-city jive. A gray haze of cigarette smoke drifted toward a ceiling of unpainted two-by-fours and kept the termite population to manageable levels. On the men’s room wall, above a machine that dispensed condoms for a quarter, a poet had scrawled, “Encase your porker before you dork her.”