Life: An Exploded Diagram (15 page)

“Why, Maddie?”

“Because boys like to think they’re making progress. They’d absolutely loathe to think that you are in control of things. They want to believe that you’re absolutely dying for it, but terribly afraid of giving in. So when you do give in, they think it’s because they’re irresistible. Besides, it’s the most wonderful fun, making them wait. They get into the most extraordinary states. You can do almost anything with them, darling.”

Frankie wasn’t sure if countless stolen snogs in the hedges of fruit fields counted as dates. Perhaps parts, or fractions, of dates.If they did, the arithmetic was complicated. But the answer probably came to five, at least. So she shifted onto her back and took Clem’s right hand and guided it up inside her T-shirt and pressed it onto the slithery nylon that cupped her left breast. This had a startling effect: Clem sucked all the breath out of her mouth and moaned at the same time. She opened her eyes and found herself looking into his. They were sort of glazed.

He said, “God, Frankie. God.”

She could feel his hard thingy against her leg. Little electrical currents ran through her.

“Do you really love me?”

“Yeah. Christ, Frankie.”

She pressed her fingers on his and showed them what to do.

“I love you, too.”

She was both relieved and surprised that she meant it.

A
T THIS POINT
I need to take you on a short detour. I’m very much a cause-and-effect sort of a fellow. I’m fascinated by the way things fit together (and come to pieces). And if we were to take what eventually happened to Frankie and me and drew something like a flowchart of how it came about, one of its arrows would lead us into the darkness of a Caribbean night: the night of February 15, 1898, in fact. Just off the north coast of Cuba, in Havana Bay.

The half-moon appears only fitfully among slow-moving clouds, and stars are few and far between. It is very quiet. The only scraps of sound are the clop and trundle of the horse-drawn carriages along the Malecón, Havana’s seafront boulevard, and snatches of brassy music. Apart from where the city’s lights spill into the harbor, the sea is black. In its vastness, tiny spangles bob, the lamps of fishing boats. But there is one larger concentration of lights, those of an American warship, the USS
Maine.

It is nine forty p.m. There are few strollers or lingerers along Havana’s shoreline; the authorities, having recently crushed another revolution, do not encourage the populace to gather after dark. But for those who witness it, who stagger and scream or are momentarily paralyzed by it, who are physically rocked by it, the explosion will be unforgettable. A vast plume of fire erupts from the sea, then forms itself into a boiling globe of red and orange that recolors the city. The sound comes an instant later, a lumbering thunderclap that seems to last an impossibly long time, echoing, even though there is nothing for it to echo from. The
Maine
has blown up. The front third of the ship, where most of its crew were sleeping or playing cards or writing letters, has been transformed into fiery vapor. The sleepers, the gamblers, the writers, have disintegrated. Their bits, their atoms, are hurled into the sky, then rain down onto the surface of the sea, like the grains of an exhausted firework. Within minutes the remaining hulk of the ship has gone, gulped onto the floor of the bay. Two hundred and sixty-six men are dead.

(By one of those coincidences that make you wonder if there is in fact a Scriptwriter Beyond the Stars, my grandmother Winifred entered the world, red, slippery, and resentful, just a few minutes later. Perhaps even before the waters had regathered themselves above the wreck of the
Maine.
)

Pretty much as soon as they were united, the United States of America started hankering after Cuba. (And still do.) How could they not? It was the biggest island in the Caribbean. Tropical and lush, blessed with lovely beaches, it was so temptingly close: only ninety miles from the southern tip of Florida. Its capital, Havana, is the same distance from Miami as Washington, D.C., is from New York City. The island grew lots of sugarcane, and America had a very sweet tooth. Unfortunately, Cuba was part of the Spanish Empire. (Spain’s hired Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, had discovered it, much to the surprise of the people who already lived there.) In 1848 President James Polk offered to buy it. The Spanish declined, in no uncertain terms, and continued to treat the Cubans very harshly, which greatly distressed the freedom-loving and slave-owning Americans.

In 1895, after another failed uprising, the Spanish sent a general (fondly nicknamed
El Carnicero,
the Butcher) to get Cuba more firmly under control. One of his tactics was to herd huge numbers of people into concentration camps, where the military could more conveniently keep an eye on them. And while the military watched, the internees died, hundreds of thousands of them, from disease and starvation.

There was widespread outrage in the United States, and the newspapers clamored for President McKinley to
do something:
ideally, turf the goddamn Spaniards out of Cuba and take over the place. McKinley didn’t do that. He issued dire warnings to the Spanish, who ignored them and continued on their brutally merry way. Then, toward the end of January 1898, the president sent the USS
Maine
to Havana, thinking, I suppose, that the sight of American sea power might persuade them that he was serious. The Cuban authorities treated the crew — the officers, at least — with careful courtesy. (The ordinary sailors were not allowed ashore, in case trouble broke out. Which must have been deeply frustrating, so close to a tropical island reputedly full of beautiful dusky women and awash with rum.)

And then —
WHUMPH!
— the
Maine
was gone.

The U.S. Navy conducted an inquiry and concluded that the ship’s magazine — its ammunition store, containing several tons of explosive charges for its guns — had blown up. That was pretty much a no-brainer, given the violence of the cataclysm. But the navy also decided that the explosion had been triggered by a mine. And, of course, the only people who could have planted the mine were the Spanish. This conclusion was almost certainly wrong, but that didn’t matter. It gave the Americans a reason to go in.

On April 22, 1898, McKinley ordered a sea blockade of Cuba to strangle the trade in and out of the place. Two days later, Spain declared war on America. It was one of the dumbest moves in all history. The U.S. trounced them. The war was over in less than three months, and the Americans took possession of the Spanish Empire, which, in addition to Cuba, included the Philippine Islands on the other side of the world altogether.

Surprisingly, the U.S. did not declare Cuba to be part of its territory; it didn’t make it one of the United States. Officially, it occupied the country for only four years. In fact, it controlled the country for the next sixty, until, in my lifetime, the nightmare figure of Fidel Castro loomed over the horizon.

But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

In the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, Cuba became the holiday destination for rich Americans. And where you find rich Americans, you will find the Mafia. The Mob moved in pretty early. Meyer Lansky, probably the cleverest gangster ever, saw the possibilities quicker than most. If Americans with plenty of money were sailing or flying south for a suntan, what else might they want while they were there? Class hotels? Certainly. Casinos, bars, brothels, drugs, racetracks, nightclubs? Definitely. Lansky went to Cuba and got himself appointed “adviser on gambling reform” to the U.S.-sponsored dictator, Fulgencio Batista. You can imagine what kind of gambling reform advice a casino-owning mobster would offer a tyrant: “Like, just keep the cops away, Fulgencio, unless we need a bad loser beaten up, okay? And let’s not talk about taxes. Here, put this fat envelope in your pocket.”

Lansky built himself a twenty-one-story hotel on the Havana seafront. His brother built one just down the way. Cuba became America’s marijuana-smoking, coke-snorting, sex-drenched, rum-addled tropical playground. One of the privileged young Americans who went there, as an official guest, was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Years later he would be one of the men who played a game of political poker, with the survival of the world at stake, and hurried me and Frankie toward our fate.

Yet again, I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s not easy, keeping history in line. Herding cats in fog is easy by comparison.

America’s party in paradise came to a sudden and shocking end. Castro’s boatload of revolutionaries landed in Cuba late in 1956. They were betrayed almost immediately and ambushed by government forces. Fidel, his brother Raúl, and Che Guevara survived and hightailed it into the mountains. From there, the
Barbudos
(Bearded Ones) gathered new recruits and conducted a guerrilla war that lasted two years. Amazingly, the
Barbudos
won it. In December 1958, Batista fled and Fidel assumed power. He turfed the Yankees out and took their mining companies, sugar plantations, and fruit farms under state control. The music died and the lights went out in the hotels, casinos, and brothels.

For the U.S., it was a humiliating trauma. It was like losing your elegant, beautiful, easygoing mistress to a sweaty, hairy lout. The Americans were very sore about it. When John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, Castro was high up on his list of Things to Take Care Of. The Central Intelligence Agency created Operation Mongoose, dedicated to getting rid of Fidel. It planned acts of sabotage inside Cuba: propaganda, subversion, assassination attempts. Kennedy’s younger brother Robert was given the task of overseeing the operation. The truth is, though, that Mongoose was a crackpot, cowboy organization. It came up with some highly imaginative plans to unseat Castro. They would put explosives into his cigars. They’d spray LSD into the radio studio from which Fidel broadcast his endless speeches to the nation; the tripped-out leader would start burbling about turning into a flying peacock or some such, and the Cubans would think he’d gone insane. They’d doctor Fidel’s clothes with a chemical that caused total hair loss; without a beard, the leader of the Bearded Ones would also lose his credibility. Maybe those gullible Cubans would see his denuded chin as a sign from God.

The CIA also tried a more direct approach. Thousands of anti-Castro Cubans had gone into exile in the U.S. The CIA recruited fifteen hundred of them, armed them, and trained them (in secret, and not very well) to reinvade Cuba. The adventure turned into a disaster. When, in 1961, this amateur army landed on the island, Castro’s forces overwhelmed them at a place called, rather unfortunately, the Bay of Pigs. The Americans had ships offshore and warplanes on standby. But President Kennedy, wanting to conceal his government’s involvement in the plot, refused to send them to the rescue. The survivors of the invading force ended up in Castro’s jails.

Two things that are important to our story came out of this sorry episode. The first is that among the high command of America’s military, Kennedy instantly acquired a reputation for being “gutless.” The word haunted him. When, a year later, he found himself in a showdown with the world’s other superpower, the Soviet Union, he needed to show that he did have guts actually. And since nuclear missiles were involved, that was dangerous. The second thing is that after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Castro announced that he was not just a nationalist but also a Communist and that Cuba would be governed much like the Soviet Union and would consider itself an ally of the Russians.

This was too much. This was a major upping of the temperature of the “cold war” between the West and the Soviet Union. America yelled,
“What?
A
Communist
state just off
Florida
? A Russian outpost in the goddamn
Caribbean
? No way!”

The U.S. military and the CIA got busy working on plans for the conquest of Cuba. And it would be no Mickey Mouse boat operation this time. This time, Fidel Castro and his hairy henchmen would find out what it felt like to have American fighter-bombers drop the fires of hell on their heads three hundred times a day.

As it turned out, things were not going to be that simple.

The leader of the Soviet Union, Kennedy’s counterpart in that divided world back then, was Nikita Khrushchev. He’d been delighted, of course, when the crazy guy Castro had chucked out Batista and given America a bloody nose. Seeing as how the Soviets and the Americans were locked into a battle for world domination, any American loss was Russia’s gain. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, and all that. Besides, Khrushchev secretly harbored a romantic view of revolution. He’d spent most of his life struggling to survive the quiet treachery of Russian politics and was tired of it. The nice, clean idea of running from rock to rock shooting at Yankee capitalists, actually killing enemies rather than making deals with them, appealed to him very deeply. The trouble was that although he admired Fidel Castro, Khrushchev didn’t know what to make of him. Castro hated America, which was good. But he talked about freedom all the time, and that was worrying. Freedom had no place in the Soviet system. Freedom was another word for anarchy, and that wouldn’t do at all. And Comrade Khrushchev had a deep-seated distrust of men who wore beards. All the same, when Fidel announced that Cuba was an ally of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev was pleasantly surprised. For years now, the damned Americans had positioned their nuclear missiles on the Soviet Union’s borders, in Turkey, Iran, South Korea. But now there was a pro-Soviet Cuba, deliciously close to the U.S. It offered some very tempting opportunities.

In April 1962 Khrushchev was entertaining his defense minister, Malinovsky, at his holiday home on the Black Sea coast. Standing on the balcony, looking south toward Turkey, Khrushchev said, “How about we stick a hedgehog down Kennedy’s shorts?”

In May 1962, when, in England, Frankie should have been working for her O levels, when she was still beyond my wildest and most fevered dreams, a delegation of Russians arrived in Havana. They wore civilian clothes. They were, officially, “agricultural advisers” led by “Engineer Petrov.” Petrov was, in fact, Marshal S. S. Biryuzov, head of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Services. His men didn’t know anything much about agriculture, but they knew an awful lot about building bases from which ballistic missiles could be launched at the United States. By the time Frankie first slid her sweet and smoky tongue between my lips, the Russians were busy clearing patches of jungle and laying concrete pads for rocket launchers. And all through that summer, while Frankie and I sought secret places to explore each other, Soviet men and armaments were being smuggled into Cuba. They made the immense voyage from the Black Sea to the Caribbean in innocent-looking freighters or passenger ships. On the day in September that I returned to school, reluctantly and dazed by love, a ship called the
Omsk
arrived in Havana. Its cargo was sixty R-12 missiles, each capable of carrying a nuclear warhead equal to a million tons of high explosive.