“But don’t you understand anything? Don’t you realize I don’t know what the hell I’ll do with myself when I get back to Miami?”
“Calle 8 was what I wanted to see first. Before getting to his house, before going to bed with him. I’d created Calle 8 in my head, and it was like a fiesta and a museum. I couldn’t imagine it any other way: a place of entertainment, full of bright lights and bustle, where the music played at full volume and people walked along the pavements, happy and carefree, enjoying that Little Havana where the good and the bad survived that had died out in this other Havana. That’s why it also had to be a place that had stayed still in time, where I would find a country I didn’t know and had always wanted to discover: like this country was before 1959, a café on every street corner, a jukebox playing boleros in every bar, a game of dominoes in every arcade, a street where you could get anything without queuing or finding out whether it was your turn or not according to the ration book. Like everybody else I’d heard the stories here in Havana and turned that blissful Calle 8 into a myth, and transformed it mentally into something like the heart of Cuban Miami… I remember how it was already dark when we left the airport and after three years without seeing each other I told Miguel my first wish and he asked me what it was I wanted to see on Calle 8 that was so pressing, and I told him: ‘That’s it, Calle 8, Little Havana…’ And to do something as simple and straightforward as eating a steak sandwich on a street corner.
“But that is all Calle 8 is: a street manufactured by the nostalgia of those who live in Miami and the dreams of those of us who want to go there. It is like the fake ruins of a country that doesn’t exist and never existed, and what remains is sick from an overdose of agonizing and prosperity, of hatred and oblivion. And consequently what I found, in the Calle 8 I’d been fabricating while waiting for my exit visa, was an ugly, lifeless, spiritless avenue, where almost nobody walked on pavements, where I heard no music I wanted to hear, found no carefree entertainment, or fry-up stalls selling the steak sandwich I wanted. Not even arcades with lots of columns, because there are no arcades in Miami… Three drunks cursed cars driving by. ‘They came out from Mariel,’ said Miguel almost contemptuously, and two old people like my grandparents drinking coffee by a restaurant… The rest was silence. The silence of death.
“ ‘Miami is a strange place; not at all like you imagine it, is it?’ commented Miguel as we turned at the end of Little Havana and went off towards Flager and his house. ‘Take a good look: Miami is nothing. Because it’s got everything but lacks the vital element: it has no heart.”
“He had a bad time of it in those early years. In Madrid he’d depended on the charity of nuns and when he finally made it to the United States and to Miami, he’d worked as a hotel porter, a toll-collector on the freeway, on a supermarket till, until he got a job in a firm that imported and exported produce from Santo Domingo, and then things improved. But he never got involved in politics, though he had several visits from people who tried to involve him. You know, with the position he held in Cuba, it might have smoothed his way if he’d made a few declarations and ingratiated himself with some of the local political grandees, but he’d already written to me in a letter how he was afraid someone would find out he’d been in charge of expropriating properties owned by many people who now lived in Miami. And people in Miami are not the kind to forgive and forget, I can tell you, although they like to turn a blind eye to the renegades who jump ship: it’s mathematics really, a simple matter of addition, you know?
“That night, in his house, Miguel and I could at last talk about why he’d stayed in Spain without telling me anything beforehand and without any proper preparations. I’d never wanted to reproach him for his decision, for I knew there must be an important reason behind such an unexpected exit, living as we did in Cuba, with almost everything that one could wish for. Finally he told me his situation at work wasn’t what it had been, and that any day it might have all collapsed, as it did not long after, and he also told me my brother Fermín was getting money together to buy a boat and would leave with me for Miami while he’d defect in Spain because he didn’t want to leave by sea. You remember, his trauma about the sea? Well, not long after, they found Fermín had been embezzling, put him in jail and the whole plan collapsed… though I never knew anything about it.
“And so there we were, in Miami, a city Miguel couldn’t stand, living on a wage and trying to relaunch his life, and I can tell you it wasn’t easy. Calle 8 was like a premonition of everything I was and wasn’t going to find in Miami and immediately I understood why Miguel said it wasn’t how you thought it should be. Although it’s full of Cubans, people don’t live like they lived in Cuba anymore or behave as they behaved in Cuba. Those who don’t work here can only think about working over there and possessing things: every day a new purchase, even though they are working themselves to death. Those who were atheist over here become religious and never miss a mass. Those who were militant communists become even more militant anti-communists, and when they can’t hide what they were, they shout it from the rooftops, parade their renunciation like a trophy, fully aware of the consequences, you know? There are even people who left here cursing the place, and who are even more fucked in Miami and so they decide it’s their business to say dialogue would be best and that it should all be sorted through talk. Besides, something similar is happening there to what happened here with the image of Miami: the people there are beginning to turn Cuba into a myth, to imagine it as a desire, rather than remembering it as it was, and they live in a halfway house, going nowhere: they can’t decide whether to forget Cuba or be new people in a new country, and finally they’re neither one thing nor the other, like me, because after living there for eight years I don’t know where I want to be or what I want to be… It’s a national tragedy. Miami is nothing and Cuba is a dream that never existed… The truth is I don’t know why I’m telling you about my life, about Miguel and Fermín. Perhaps because I think I can trust you. Or probably because I’m afraid and know that the worst of all this is that I must go back and Miguel won’t be there to help me to live that peculiar life he forced on me. Do you still think it’s strange that I curse the day we decided to return to this blessed isle for ten days?”
After seven failed attempts, the dialling tone offered by the eighth public telephone he tried was like heavenly music to the Count’s ears. At his wits’ end he put his last coin in the slot and dialled Manolo’s number and the ringing reaching him from infinity seemed a just reward for his labours.
“It’s me, Manolo. Listen carefully, let’s hope the line doesn’t go dead.”
“Sing on, Conde.”
“Something very strange happened…”
“You’ve seen a ghost?”
“Shut up and listen, I’ve used my last coin: I spoke to Miriam and she told me half her life-story. I need you to get weaving as early as possible tomorrow and sort two things as quickly as possible: get the Immigration people to act so she can’t leave for three or four days for whatever reason, but not let on that we’re keeping her here. Get the people on the airline she travelled with to say there are no seats, no flights, that there’s no petrol for the planes, whatever, but give her no inkling we’re the ones forcing her to stay, get it? Because I need her to keep talking… The other thing you should do is look out information on her brother, Fermín Bodes Alvarez. From what Miriam told me, I reckon the man may know what Miguel Forcade was after in Cuba, because I’m now sure he was after something he couldn’t take with him in ’78 and that’s why they killed him. Got all that?”