Castro's Curveball

Prologue

We are up above the clouds--safe for now. Even through the plane's window, the Caribbean sun feels as hot and dream inducing as I remember it.

Besides me, my daughter Cassy sleeps the sleep of the innocent and the stubborn. With my fingertips, I slowly bring her head, with its fine blond hair, to rest on my shoulder. Softly, so as not to wake her, I stroke her neck just as I'd done when she was a child. I listen to the roar of the jet engines, feel this southern sun again on my face for the first time in many years, and wonder what we have gotten ourselves into.

Cassy has her mother's round face and my sharp nose. Some would say that she would have been better off with a little less of each, but I don't think that. When she was seven or so, I can remember walking the fields out in back of our house and talking to God about her, wishing her plain. Please, let her be a plain girl, a plain Jane. I was convinced only that would keep her safe in this world. For I know that the pretty and the beautiful, those talented and the gifted, the ones made closest to His image, always end up getting hurt. Of that you can be sure.

As with most conversations I've ever had with God, the results weren't exactly as I'd hoped for. In terms of her looks, my daughter didn't turn out to be classically beautiful. But there's something about her smile, the way her gray-blue eyes sparkle, that people, especially boys, always seem to enjoy. Even I am not immune to being carried aloft by her enthusiasm. After all, she is the one who has led me back to Cuba after all these years.

My Cassy flies all the time. She is the lone flight attendant on a commuter airline making hops from Buffalo to Cincinnati or Washington or Boston. She makes at least four round trips a day, five days a week. That's why she got such a kick out of how they do things on this Cubana Air flight. No drinks or snacks. Instead candies--peppermint, butterscotch, mango--are offered up in straw baskets to keep our ears from popping. There are no other services on this ninety-minute flight from Cancún to Havana.

Cassy's breathing is soft and relaxed. I turn from her to look out the window. Far below, in between the clouds, I catch my first glimpse of Cuba in more than forty years. It's how I remember it--a ribbon of white sand beach and then mile after mile of dark-green interior. After all the times I meant to come back here, especially that night in '53, it seems strange to come back now, with a grown daughter in tow. If it wasn't for Cassy, I would have stayed in Middleport, NY, living on my high school teacher's pension, learning to be a widower after thirty-seven years of marriage. I am coming to the end of many things, and, quite simply, I want to be left alone.

My wife, Laurie, died nine weeks ago this Tuesday. I especially miss her on cold mornings and late at night when every sound, real or imagined, echoes through the empty farmhouse on Slayton Settlement Road that we filled with devotion and purpose for all those years.

It's funny. Once upon a time I thought that I would be enjoy being alone again. Staying married, learning to overlook the small trespasses that mount over the years, can exhaust anyone. A man can be married to a veritable saint, as I believe I was, and yet he can still find himself walking the fields in back of his house, wondering where he will find the strength to hold himself, hold the marriage together. That's what being married does to you. It demands penance in the form of compromise and responsibility. When your living it, it can all seem to be too much at times. But now I find myself trying to make sense of a different kind of pain.

Here again, I think that God has fed me a little off speed pitch to keep me off balance. He has taught me that missing someone you loved deeply makes you long for the days of making adjustments, enduring the rounds of petty disagreements than can dim any marriage. Though she is gone, my wife remains, as she always did, very much with me. As I sit here, suspended above an island that once held such promise for me, I don't feel worthy of such devotion.

I feel this and simply want to fade away; try and wrestle thos feelings to some kind of stalemate. That's what I had planned to do until Cassy found that damn scrapbook.

Leave it to my whirling dervish of a daughter to take it upon herself to clean my house, attic to basement, days after her mother's death. I had told her nothing of Cuba, the years I spent playing baseball there. It was her mother, even through she had every reason to want to forget those years I spent in Cuba, who put those scrapbooks together, kept them tucked away where I couldn't get at them. It was only when she lay in a foggy shroud of pain killers near the end that she mentioned Cuba again, told me how proud she would have been if she could have seen me that last year. All I could do was squeeze her hand, a whispered thank you barely able to tear its way past my constricted throat.

After the discovery of the scrapbook, one thing led to another. Cassy especially liked a photo she found from those times of a farm boy struggling to lead a pack of plow horses. She had it framed and after I reluctantly told her who took it, she wrote repeatedly to Cuba, eager to locate more of this photographer's work. To my amazement, her efforts were rewarded.

        First came the letters, with stamps of orange-tipped butterflies and old generals. In a neat script, the photographer's daughter, Eván Fonseca, told a fantastic tale. One in which her mother, Malena Fonseca, and I were companions in that time before the revolution. She told my daughter that we should visit. How there were plenty of Americans down here. How she met them every day on the streets.

        To further convince us, she sent cheaply made books of her mother's works. Published in Spain and Mexico, they were filled with black-and-white photographs of Cuba before the revolution. Then came the volume simply entitled "Fidel." In flipping through the shots of the Cuban president, my Cassy came to a picture of me and my best friend at the time, Chuck Cochrane, and, standing between us, a boyish Fidel Castro. Yes, that Fidel Castro.

        He was so skinny back then. No bushy beard. Just a wisp of a beard that I remember he had only started to grow. At times he was so self-conscious and unsure of himself that he constantly covered his upper lip with his hands, looking more like a blushing teenager. Other times he was as brash as a school yard bully.

        In the photograph, all of us were smiling like fools in the bright mid-day sun. The caption said the picture was taken in 1947.

        Our plane banks and we begin our descent into Havana. Americans aren't legally permitted to enter Cuba. Back in Cancun, we had bribed who we hoped were the right people. We had been told repeatedly what to say, how to act, when we reached customs in Cuba. Sitting by the side of Mexicana Hilton pool, a gentle breeze sweeping in from the gulf, it had seemed so easy. But now, as I look again at my precious daughter, I worry that this trip will bring us only heartbreak and sorrow. When you're as old as I am, you can sense trouble coming from a long ways off. It is another curse of growing old. Often you can see the future, but nobody ever heeds your warnings.

        Around my neck, tucked inside my shirt, hangs a pouch with one thousand dollars in it. Another thousand dollars, also in small bills, is in my money belt, with the final thousand underneath Cassy's left armpit, riding in a shoulder holster...