King of Cuba

To Pilar, always, and to Linda Howe, beloved traveling companions

What sorrow is greater to us
than returning from misery to the sweet time?

—Robert Lowell

Truth is that
which history scorns

—Octavio Paz

TROPICAL FORECAST: Mostly sunny throughout Cuba with scattered thundershowers. Hot days ahead with temperatures up to 35 degrees Celsius. Global warming begins here, compays. ¿Qué? You were expecting another Ice Age? The winds are blowing in from the Atlantic at 30 kilometers per hour. The sea will be turbulent on the northeast littoral. Save those inner tubes for another night . . .

El Comandante gazed out the window at the stale light of another tropical morning, at the long curve of crumbling seaside buildings. Spindly, sun-sick palms splintered the skies with their spiky fronds. The sea was a rumpled bed of blues. The usual lovebirds tangled on the malecón, verging on public fornication. He’d passed laws against such displays but it hadn’t deterred the couples. The seawall remained theirs, as it had for generations of lovers before them. It was bad enough that Cuba had a reputation as the brothel of the Caribbean—in a desperate bid for foreign currency, he’d once pronounced his country’s prostitutes the healthiest and best educated on the planet—but this was hardly a laudable distinction.

The tyrant was accustomed to being exceptional, and so he didn’t expect that rules governing ordinary human mortality should apply to him. Nothing in his life had followed anyone else’s
rules, so why must he go the way of every mediocre nobody on the planet? Dying, he’d decided, was a fate for lesser men. He didn’t believe in death, at least not for him. From the corner of his eye, he checked the expression on the nurse’s face as she cleaned him up. Not a trace of derision or disgust. He’d read her dossier. Twelve years in the secret service, here and abroad. A regular Mata Hari. Certainly she’d had to execute more disagreeable tasks than this.

El Comandante struggled to open the window nearest him. “Carajo, somebody help me with this goddamn thing!” he thundered, prompting the assistant his wife had dubbed El Huele Huele, the ass sniffer, to scurry in and prop it open with a wedge of plywood. Turbulent southeast winds blew straight for his enemies in Miami. The distaste of their collective name—gusanos—was an old poison on his tongue. Those worms were a wiped-out class here, their legacy extinct, and he’d made sure it would stay that way. He elbowed aside a goose-down pillow. He’d left his mark on history with ink, and action, and blood. Not even the most bitter, pathetic exile shopkeeper could deny him that. The tyrant shifted onto his left hip, aiming his scrawny buttocks at the Straits of Florida, and released a sputtering, malodorous stream of flatus.

“Take that, you fat-livered idiots,” he muttered, slumping against his padded headboard. Satisfied, he smoothed the top sheet over his withered knees, then coughed until he felt his ribs would snap.

Another minion appeared with a pitcher of water, his pills, and the day’s newspapers stacked high on a portable desk. El Comandante reached for his bifocals. He didn’t trust anyone’s editing of world events. Nobody saw opportunity, the plots and betrayals bubbling below the surface of politics-as-usual, like he did. His grandchildren had taught him how to navigate the Internet, but its distractions were pernicious: pornography websites and chat rooms on penile implants that wasted precious hours of what
remained of his life. These days sex seemed to him a muscle memory in the loins—a waxy heat that had telegraphed pleasure to the very root of his spine, rendering him pure animal. Those sensations had vanished in the end, and only the many lives he’d engendered remained, trapping him in nooses of competing demands until he regretted that celibacy hadn’t come sooner.

There was no mention of him in the foreign press, though it was the official anniversary of the Revolution. Instead other world leaders populated the front pages like so many party crashers. Hijos de puta. His government’s rag had published a ten-page spread of him that included the same old photographs, recycled interviews, and a picture of his brother Fernando that was a quarter inch larger around than his. Somebody would pay dearly for that mistake. In recent years, El Comandante was usually featured, when he was featured at all, with his junior bad-boy counterpart in Venezuela, now deceased, a megalomaniac toward whom it had been difficult to keep a civil public face. If it hadn’t been for his vast reserves of oil—sugar and oil, the island would grind to a halt without either—their alliance would’ve ended like the infamous party at Guatao.

Dry toast and oatmeal again. What he wouldn’t give right now for a porterhouse steak and three fried eggs, over easy, followed by a double scotch. Fuck it if his insides turned to lead. It was only a matter of time before his dentures were on display at the Museum of the Revolution, which, it so happened, was preparing another cradle-to-near-grave retrospective on his life. El Comandante examined his hands, which bulged from his wrists like oven mitts. The doctors had no explanation for the swelling, which seemed to come and go with the tides. He pulled out a pocket mirror and checked his eyes. They looked pouchy and tinged with gray. Sleep was a luxury he couldn’t afford. In any given twenty-four hours, somebody, somewhere, was plotting to kill him. By staying awake,
the tyrant believed he could detect plots like radar, monitor conversations, sotto voce vituperations, allegiances forged with a curse and a handshake.

Over the years he’d thwarted every dirty trick and assassination attempt in the book. The most ludicrous failures gave him the most pleasure to recount: the exploding Cohiba cigars, the arsenic-laced milk shakes, the foot powder meant to make his beard fall out. There was that memorable CIA agent, too, who’d masqueraded as a journalist—the comely Elizabeth Bond, a lesbian, had volunteered for the assignment, certain she could resist her target’s charms (she couldn’t). Another low point: the sixteen-foot Nile crocodile trained by its exile handlers to attack his femoral artery. The reptile, unleashed at a black-tie affair in Cairo, dispatched the French ambassador instead.

The price of power—ceaseless vigilance—was high, but El Comandante was willing to pay it. Who was it who said if you lived long enough, you’d see your reputation maligned three times? That, in his estimation, was a modest number. Soon enough he planned to set the record straight, to put an end to the creeping amnesia regarding the glories of his revolution. He’d ordered Fernando to develop a program that would reenact the regime’s most illustrious days: the attack on the Moncada barracks; the “History Will Absolve Me” speech during the despot’s 1953 trial for treason; the landing of the
Granma
on the shores of Oriente; the triumph at the Bay of Pigs. El Comandante hoped that these commemorations would draw hordes of tourists—politically sophisticated ones, not the cheap rum and whore chasers currently invading the island. Hard currency in hand, they, too, would help cement his legacy.

The inaugural program, a restaging of the sixty-eight-hour Bay of Pigs invasion, had been scheduled for April but was postponed due to logistical problems until his birthday next month. The tyrant
had warned that heads would roll should there be further delays. His ambassadors had extended invitations to dignitaries worldwide and, after extensive auditions, he’d personally selected a dashing militiaman to play the younger him. The soldier had no acting experience but boasted impeccable Communist Party credentials and promised to grow a suitably scraggly beard for the role.

El Comandante flung aside
La Prensa
. A staunch ally in the Buenos Aires workers’ movement had been killed during a strike. It was a much-battered cliché to say that when a man approached the portal of death, even as die-hard an atheist as he would quaver at the prospect of eternal nothingness and beg, at the last humiliating moment, for a priest and the promise of salvation. But to El Líder, God remained an elaborate fiction, at least the God of his Latin-spouting Jesuit teachers. If, as they’d maintained, every man was made in His image, why not simply go a step further and become Him? After all, the tyrant hadn’t merely survived, he’d lived—flauntingly, outrageously—in the shadow of an imperial power bent on his destruction for the better part of adjoining centuries. If that didn’t qualify him for deification, nothing could.

He rejected agnosticism, too, though an agnostic was probably the most sensible thing to be if you were a gambling man. These days when he tried to imagine God, something he did more often of late, he pictured Him as a massive, pulsing neural network of simultaneity and multidimensional consciousness. Come to think of it, this image was pretty identical to his own job. Such sacrilegious thinking pleased the tyrant. Years ago he’d incensed the island’s archbishop by arguing that the Church, given its propensity for propaganda, dogmatism, and absolute authority, could be construed as the perfect Socialist state; a good Catholic as the perfect, unquestioning Socialist man. Even death was a form of socialism, leveling the noble and the ignoble, the king and the humble shoveler of shit to the same classless fate.

In the end, who was to say what mattered—illusion, or reality? After more than a half century of revolutionary reality, not a single soul on the island could’ve survived without illusion. Revolution required illusion. The two went hand in glove, like a plate of rice and beans. His revolution had attempted to wrest dreams of a better future from the ever gristly, unyielding present—and without the luxury of an afterlife either. At the very least, it’d provided every citizen with this: the opportunity to participate in the greatest narrative in modern times. In the end, Cuba could support just one utopia—his. Why? Because nobody on the island had bigger cojones than he did. Nadie. Except perhaps, at one time, his father.

The tyrant recalled his first vision, at age four, of Papá’s prodigious pinga, steaming like a locomotive after a hot bath and flanked by grapefruit-size balls (or so they’d seemed to him) that hung confidently, hirsutely, where his thick thighs flared. That same evening, as his mother bathed the little despot-to-be, taking care to wash the pink bud of his manhood and dust it with enough talcum powder to make it look like a lump of sugared dough, he worked up the courage to ask: “Mami, will all of me grow?” His puzzled mother had helped him into his calzoncillos before it occurred to her what he was asking. “Ay, mijito, your pinga will be the greatest in the land, in all the Americas, perhaps in all the world!” The boy was cautiously pleased. “Okay, the greatest. But will it also be the biggest?”