In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

Grove Press

Chapter One

The park where the four men gathered was small. Before thecity put it on its tourist maps, it was just a fenced rectangle ofspace that people missed on the way to their office jobs. Themen came each morning to sit under the shifting shade of abanyan tree, and sometimes the way the wind moved throughthe leaves reminded them of home.

    One man carried a box of plastic dominos. His name wasMáximo, and because he was a small man his grandiose namehad inspired much amusement all his life. He liked to say thatover the years he'd learned a thing or two about the physics oflaughter and his friends took that to mean good humor couldmake a big man out of anyone. Now Máximo waited for theothers to sit before turning the dominos out on the table. Judgingthe men to be in good spirits, he cleared his throat and beganto tell the joke he had prepared for the day.

    "So Bill Clinton dies in office and they freeze his body."

    Antonio leaned back in his chair and let out a sigh. "Herewe go."

    Máximo caught a roll of the eyes and almost grew annoyed.But he smiled. "It gets better."

    He scraped the dominos in two wide circles across thetable, then continued.

    "Okay, so they freeze his body and when we get the technologyto unfreeze him, he wakes up in the year 2105."

    "Two thousand one hundred and five, eh?"

    "Very good," Máximo said. "Anyway, he's curious aboutwhat's happened to the world all this time, so he goes up to aJewish fellow and he says, `So, how are things in the MiddleEast?' The guy replies, `Oh wonderful, wonderful, everythingis like heaven. Everybody gets along now.' This makes Clintonsmile, right?"

    The men stopped shuffling and dragged their pieces acrossthe table and waited for Máximo to finish.

    "Next he goes up to an Irishman and he says, `So howare things over there in Northern Ireland now?' The guy says,`Northern? It's one Ireland now and we all live in peace.'Clinton is extremely pleased at this point, right? So he doesthat biting thing with his lip."

    Máximo stopped to demonstrate and Raúl and Carlosslapped their hands on the domino table and laughed. Máximopaused. Even Antonio had to smile. Máximo loved this momentwhen the men were warming to the joke and he still keptthe punch line close to himself like a secret.

    "So, okay," Máximo continued, "Clinton goes up to aCuban fellow and says, `Compadre, how are things in Cubathese days?' The guy looks at Clinton and he says to the president,`Let me tell you, my friend, I can feel it in my bones.Any day now Castro's gonna fall.'"

    Máximo tucked his head into his neck and smiled. Carlosslapped him on the back and laughed.

    "That's a good one, sure is," he said. "I like that one."

    "Funny," Antonio said, nodding as he set up his pieces.

    "Yes, funny," Raúl said. After chuckling for anothermoment, he added, "But old."

    "What do you mean old?" Antonio said, then he turnedto Carlos. "What are you looking at?"

    Carlos stopped laughing.

    "It's not old," Máximo said. "I just made it up."

    "I'm telling you, professor, it's an old one," Raúl said. "Iheard it when Reagan was president."

    Máximo looked at Raúl, but didn't say anything. Hepulled the double nine from his row and laid it in the middleof the table, but the thud he intended was lost in the horns andcurses of morning traffic on Eighth Street.

* * *

Raúl and Máximo had lived on the same El Vedado street inHavana for fifteen years before the revolution. Raúl had beena government accountant and Máximo a professor at the University,two blocks from his home on L Street. They weren'tclose friends, but friendly still in that way of people who comefrom the same place and think they already know the importantthings about one another.

    Máximo was one of the first to leave L Street, boarding aplane for Miami on the eve of the first of January 1961, exactlytwo years after Batista had done the same. For reasons he toldhimself he could no longer remember, he said good-bye to noone. He was thirty-six years old then, already balding, with a wifeand two young daughters whose names he tended to confuse.He left behind the row house of long shiny windows, the piano,the mahogany furniture, and the pension he thought he'd returnto in two years' time. Three if things were as serious as they said.

In Miami, Máximo tried driving a taxi, but the streets were aweb of foreign names and winding curves that could one daylead to glitter and another to the hollow end of a pistol. HisSpanish and his University of Havana credentials meant nothinghere. And he was too old to cut sugarcane with the youngermen who began arriving in the spring of 1961. But the mengave Máximo an idea, and after teary nights of promises, heconvinced his wife?she of stately homes and multiple cooks?tomake lunch to sell to those sugar men who waited, squattingon their heels in the dark, for the bus to Belle Glade everymorning. They worked side by side, Máximo and Rosa. Andat the end of every day, their hands stained orange from thelard and the cheap meat, their knuckles red and tender wherethe hot water and the knife blade had worked their business,Máximo and Rosa would sit down to whatever remained ofthe day's cooking and they would chew slowly, the day unraveling,their hunger ebbing away with the light.

    They worked together for years like that, and when theCubans began disappearing from the bus line, Máximo and Rosamoved their lunch packets indoors and opened their little restaurantright on Eighth Street. There, a generation of formerprofessors served black beans and rice to the nostalgic. WhenRaúl showed up in Miami one summer looking for work,Máximo added one more waiter's spot for his old acquaintancefrom L Street. Each night, after the customers had gone,Máximo and Rosa and Raúl and Havana's old lawyers andbankers and dreamers would sit around the biggest table andeat and talk and sometimes, late in the night after several glassesof wine, someone would start the stories that began with "InCuba I remember." They were stories of old lovers, beautifuland round-hipped. Of skies that stretched on clear and blue tothe Cuban hills. Of green landscapes that clung to the red clayof Güines, roots dug in like fingernails in a good-bye. In Cuba,the stories always began, life was good and pure. But somethingalways happened to them in the end, something withering,malignant. Máximo never understood it. The stories thatopened in sun, always narrowed into a dark place. And afterthose nights, his head throbbing, Máximo would turn and turnin his sleep and awake unable to remember his dreams.

Even now, five years after selling the place, Máximo couldn'twalk by it in the early morning when it was still clean andempty. He'd tried it once. He'd stood and stared into therestaurant and had become lost and dizzy in his own reflectionin the glass, the neat row...