Now, my uncle in his spare time would take me around Miami— he liked to eat Jewish delicatessen food in one of those art deco diners along the main street of South Beach. Funny to think about him now: this former ballroom dandy who played stand-up double bass with Xavier Cugat, and in his prime dazzlingly handsome, sitting by one of those counters, examining the free multicolored pickles left there for the taking, as if perusing jewelry. If he was religious, he kept it in a drawer. Once at a diner late on a Friday night, at about eleven, on the way back from a Shriners’ meeting, where he schmoozed (I suppose) with fellow members to drum up business (he also played canasta with them, while I sat in a room watching TV), he ordered a ham and cheese sandwich on toasted white bread, an act that absolutely shocked me, given Maya’s super-religiosity and the fact that, in those days, eating meat on Friday was strictly forbidden to Catholics. When I reminded Pedro, timidly, that he was about to commit a mortal sin, he, obviously a man of the earth and a pragmatic soul, simply shrugged, looked at the clock, and told me, “In Jerusalem, it is already Saturday.”
Later, we stopped at a Sunoco gas station, where, within a few minutes, as we sat in his idling Cadillac, a blizzard of green arrowhead-shaped insects, coming seemingly out of nowhere, had overwhelmed the place — teeming like microbios. They were so densely packed that one could hardly see anything but the faint glow of some distant highway lamps, and though much of that cloud moved on, enough of those insects remained behind to cover every surface of that place and were so thick in the air that the gas station attendants locked themselves inside: No sooner did my uncle roll up his window than he decided to drive away, and as we did, tearing out of that place, I could not help but wonder if the sudden plague had anything to do with my uncle’s attitude about that ham and cheese sandwich. Of course it didn’t, but I believed it did.
Generally, Pedro treated me as if it were only a matter of time before I’d grow up and become a more responsible person — for example, he kept showing me tool catalogues from outfits in New York City, where he wanted me to make some purchases on his behalf (why he didn’t do so with my brother, I can’t say), while Maya, going on nearly daily about all the awful things that my mother had done—“We all prayed for you, nephew, and thanked God Himself when you survived your illness”—continued to treat me as a fairly helpless infant who would be so much better off in her care.
And yet, one day, she, so accusatory toward my mother and her carelessness, fumbled badly. Maya had taken me to the beach, where we walked along the shore; later I romped in the water, shirtless and in a pair of shorts, and though I’d been out in the sun for only a few hours, my fair skin, exposed to that torrid heat without the benefit of any lotion, began to blister. And not in any small way: By the time we’d gotten back home, enormous bubbles plump with oozing liquids — and quite painful — had risen over my shoulders and arms and chest in such an alarming fashion that Maya called in a doctor. (They resembled, I remember thinking, jellyfish.) Soon enough, I was put to bed, shivering, in a back room, its window looking onto an overgrown rear garden with mango trees. A local girl, a sometime babysitter with whom I had seen a matinee of Psycho just a few days before, had been paid to watch over me, though she seemed to spend most of her time in the living room with the TV; but now and then, she’d look in to make sure I hadn’t tried to pop any of those blisters, which by then were suppurating: I had to take antibiotic medicine, and some kind of cream was placed carefully around the burns’ raw edges, or what doctors might call their diameters. But mainly, for a week, until those potentially infectious blisters began to go down, I relived that old hospital isolation again. I can remember falling in and out of some very strange bouts of sleep, thinking, because of all the tropical foliage just outside the window, that I was back in Cuba and getting sick all over again. That isolation so depressed me that I was grateful when anyone ever-so-carefully tiptoed in to see how I was doing, even my brother, who surprised me one afternoon by walking in wearing a Frankenstein mask.
And there was Maya, of course, asking that whatever else I might want to talk about with my mother and father once I got home, not to mention a word about how I had gotten sick under her care; my brother apparently had pledged to do the same.
As for the revolution in Cuba, which had taken place not so long before, I’ll only say that as it had unfolded in the mid to late 1950s, my father fully supported the cause, as so many New York Cubans did. Regularly, he contributed money to a pro-Castro movement based in Miami, and every so often, he went around the neighborhood hawking copies of a magazine, I believe it was called the Sierra Maestra, which he sold for a buck on street corners, the proceeds of which he also sent off, however indirectly, to Fidel. My child’s take on the revolution came mainly from a Cuban publication, La Bohemia, out of Havana, which he’d pick up at a kiosk in Grand Central. I remember it for the heroic portraits of the rebel forces that were featured on its covers. Inside, while I inevitably searched for a wordless single-panel comic strip called Sin Palabras—drawn, I think, by one Antonio Prohias, who as an exile later went on to earn an unlikely livelihood through his series for Mad magazine—Spy vs. Spy—I’d inevitably come across any number of sepia-tone photographs of Cuban patriots who had been jailed, tortured, and shot, their corpses shown lying in the gutters of Havana or on morgue slabs. The same issues also included more than a few hagiographic photographs of Fidel and his commanders.
My father, never a man of too many words, once told me that Fidel Castro was fighting for “la libertad”—“freedom.” Given that most of his family still lived there, the revolution’s outcome meant a lot to him, and on many a night, as his usual cohorts gathered, it became the main topic of their conversations. (That and his job at the hotel, along with work issues and how they all could be doing better wage-wise.) And no more so than on New Year’s Day 1959, when word came out that dictator Fulgencio Batista had fled Cuba: A party inevitably ensued, the apartment filled to bursting with friends, and in the smoke-dense kitchen, my father’s face aglow from exultation and booze, he could not have been more happy — even my mother seemed unabashedly to share his joy. And while I remember that as a day of a hope fulfilled, I needn’t go further now as to the disappointment they, as Cubans, were destined to feel.
Still, while knowing what would happen within a few years to Cuba, it’s hard to resist mentioning how my father once had the distinction of shaking Nikita Khrushchev’s hand, for in 1958, he and Díaz had moonlighted at a dinner banquet held in honor of the Soviet premiere at the Commodore Hotel during his famous visit to New York. It was attended by some well-known diplomats of the day — Andrei Gromyko, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Cyrus Eaton — and at some point in the evening, after the meal concluded, Khrushchev himself insisted on personally thanking the waiters and cooks, who, as workers, had served him so well. Called out from the kitchen, my father had waited alongside Díaz in his apron and whites as the husky premier made his way down the receiving line, offering his hand to each. Some years later, when the Russians began pouring into Cuba, my father must have considered it a dubious honor, and yet, I think, riding home on the subway that night, after the glamour of such an evening, he, as a former campesino from the sticks of Cuba, had probably reeled from the thrill of it all. Such was his life sometimes in that city.