The flight took some three hours and had been routine enough until, while crossing over the Florida straits on our approach to Havana, something ignited inside the airplane’s left wing fuselage, and just like that, flames started shooting out of its engines. Billows of thread-ridden plumes of smoke, like a rocket’s exhaust, spilled into the surrounding clouds, and those silvery gold sheaths of fire seemed to roll back and forth over the wingspan. As the engines sputtered, then fell dead, so exciting to a child but terrifying to adults, the plane breathing ever so heavily, my mother, like so many others around us, made the sign of the cross and began to pray and pray, as if the world were about to end; then she took hold of our hands, squeezing them tightly and only letting go when, after a bumpy descent, we’d miraculously landed safely.
There, in Havana, along the periphery of the airport, royal palms rose in the distance, the sky ever so blue, and as the cabin hatches sprang open and the dense tropic humidity warmed the compartment, we waited while a ground crew wheeled a mobile stairway up to the doors. Shortly, along with a retinue of Cubans and any number of festive, perhaps blasé tourists and commuting businessmen, we disembarked from that clipper and stepped onto the tarmac, where I first breathed the Cuban air.
Later, we caught a bus for Holguín, and during that twelve-to-eighteen-hour journey (I’ve heard both numbers) as we crossed Cuba, mainly in the dead of night, going from little pueblo to pueblo along the northern coast toward the east, I apparently did not turn out to be a very good traveler. Could have been the intense humidity, or some on-the-run snack we’d picked up from one of the vendors swarming the dusty station stops, but the more deeply we entered Cuba, the more I trembled from chills, squirming about on my mother’s lap. Soon enough, whatever I had come down with spread into my guts, so each time we stopped, I’d get off the bus, my mother holding my hand, to vomit into the darkness. (My brother, José, has told me that I did so over and over again.) At some point, my face drained of color, I fell limply asleep on her lap, my mother peering down at me. I have a memory of the bus pulling into another stop, my mother fanning herself with a newspaper, Cuban voices murmuring from the road, where the male passengers, taking a break, stood about outside puffing madly, and inseparably so, on their cigars, columns of bluish smoke curling around them like incense, an almost impossibly loud chorus of cicadas — night bells — sounding from the brush, moths crawling about in agitated circles on the windows, clouds of gnats swirling around the lantern lights. En route again, as I looked out the bus windows, I doubtlessly saw wonderful things: the ocean horizon, like a rising plain reaching up to all the stars, then endless fields of sugar and pineapple, and forests passing, their silhouettes so reminiscent not of vegetation but of contorted shadows standing at attention in row after row, like the dead (my mother along the way touching my sweating brow). Cuba itself seemed enormous to me, and as that night wore on, I probably saw a ghost or two roaming through its darkness — Cuba was full of spirits, I remember my mother telling me — and that sky, I swear, occasionally wept shooting stars.
Then morning came, and a few farmers, black cigarillos in their lips, boarded the bus with caged hens, and as roosters crowed, vendors selling little paper cups of coffee came down the aisle, and the music of a radio — a woman’s mellifluous voice, perhaps someone like Celia Cruz or Elena Burke — sounded from the doorways of the houses: I can remember thinking, sick as I felt, that I had been traveling through an immensely interesting tunnel, like that of an arcade attraction in an amusement park, but one that went on and on, seemingly forever.
Once we arrived in Holguín, however, I got better, attended to by my affectionate aunt Cheo and her adolescent daughters, Miriam and Mercita. Our days together went happily enough. Always treating me kindly, they did their best to keep their youngest cousin, a few months short of turning four, well-fed and entertained — oh, but we played in the back, where a mango tree stood, lizards crawling about and a smell of jasmine and wildflowers so strong they left one yawning and sleepy. And while their modest house was just a one-story solar and nothing special on a nondescript side street in Holguín, I’ve always considered it my own little piece of Cuba.
Though I can’t describe how the rooms were laid out, in which part of the house I slept, or even where the baño with its toilet — what my mother always called the “inodoro”—had been situated (think it was in its own shed, just off the back patio, where there was possibly a shower as well), I do know that the mornings smelled wonderfully from the fragrant and dense blessings of a nearby soda cracker factory, and that down the way, along a descending cobblestone street, on a shady corner, stood a bodega where the local campesinos, coming into town on donkeys and horses, would stop to have a few drinks, its wooden floor reeking of pungent beer. A mulatto in a straw hat passed his days there, in a narrow space behind a juice-dripping counter, chopping up pineapples, splitting coconuts, and occasionally brandishing on the tip of a machete some chunk of mango or papaya for me to eat. I’d go there with my brother in the afternoons and marvel at the thin and bony hunched-over farmers, whose faces seemed half-hidden under their hats, and at the way sunlight poured in from the back through an open door, casting their shadows into infinity.
For their part, those men, who’d grown up as rustics like my father had on a farm, chewing on their cigars and speaking as if their mouths were stuffed with cotton, must have been amused by the sudden appearance of a small blond boy in their midst. “Cheo’s nieto,” it was explained, the one who came down from New York with his mother, you know, that good-looking brunette who left Cuba with that fellow Pascual and who, however often she smiles, must have regretted it, por Dios! — it was written all over her face. They might have rubbed their eyes a few times before getting a second look at me (the story of my life); it took them a while to absorb that such a towheaded boy could have been the offspring of an Hijuelos from Jiguaní. Those campesinos would have probably known my father from the old days before he came to the States, when he used to ride the countryside on a horse himself. They would have recalled his languid demeanor and friendly but sad expression, and would have appreciated and respected me and my brother for the very fact that my father’s family had been in Oriente for over a hundred years. And in those days when every Cuban from Holguín and Jiguaní knew each other, they would have likely remembered my mother from earlier times, from seeing her at Carnival, or from the local dance halls where she, in her late adolescence and young womanhood, had so bloomed as a dancer.
And yet, however warmly those campesinos might have thought of my mother, they would have still puzzled over the fact that I didn’t look Cuban at all.
But, even if they may have been at a loss for what to make of me, they were friendly. The owner always prepared the most delicious Cuban fruit shakes for my brother and me, his machete cleaving into the counter with sharp whacks, the juices dripping down, that taste of what I suppose now had to be batidas, which might have been spiked with a little Cuban rum for flavoring, ever so delicious on my tongue. Now and then, one of those fellows would take my brother and me outside and put us on his horse, and back and forth we would go, pulled along the street, jostling by the open-shuttered windows and doorways of the houses and waving at everyone, my head muzzled in its bristly mane, people smiling at us just because we were children.