Voodoo Eyes (28 page)

‘Even though you’d heard it all before?’

‘Not the way she told it.’

‘Oh? How was that?’

‘The other Panthers claimed they were acting in self-defence or were framed by “whitey”. Vanetta never said that. She told me she was several miles away during that raid.’ Pinel lit a cigarette. Max noticed how the tips of Pinel’s index and middle fingers were stained dark brown.

‘Everyone lies sometime.’

‘Not her.’ Pinel was defensive in his insistence. Max wondered if he hadn’t been sweet on her.

‘When was the last time you saw Vanetta?’

‘In 2002, when I was still working. She wanted to publish a brand-new edition of her book,’ Pinel said. ‘It was going to tell an amazing story, the complete truth about what happened to her in Miami.’

‘And?’

‘I was enthusiastic. But I never heard from her again.’

‘Didn’t you try to contact her?’

‘Yes, a few times. Then I gave up. And a few years ago, I closed my business,’ Pinel said. ‘Maybe she’s with her family.’

‘She remarried?’

‘No. I mean her late husband’s family. The Dascals. She is close to them. Camilo and Lidia – Ezequiel’s parents – left America in 1962, on the eve of the embargo. They settled in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba’s second city,’ Pinel said. ‘The Dascals are friends of Castro. So was Vanetta – until they fell out.’

‘They fell out? When?’

‘It had to do with the Haitian boat-lifts,’ Pinel said. ‘Cuba has a large Haitian population, close to a million. They live on the eastern part of the island, along the Caribbean coast. It’s very different from here. The people speak Haitian Kreyol as well as Spanish. Castro has always been pro-Haitian, always given the refugees a home, because he and his brother were briefly fostered by a Haitian family. It was probably why he was friends with Vanetta. She set up two centres for newly arrived Haitians. The main one was in Santiago, the other in Trinidad. She called the places “Caille Jacobinne” – Kreyol for “the Jacobin House” – same as the one in Miami.’

‘When was this?’

‘Twenty years ago.’

‘Are the centres still there?’ Max pulled out a map from the side pocket of his cargo pants and opened it on the table. Santiago de Cuba was down at the bottom, near Guantánamo. Trinidad was closer, on the south coast, not far from the Bay of Pigs. He circled both places.

‘I don’t know,’ said Pinel.

‘What about these boat-lifts?’

‘That was around 1994, when Haiti was going through its big political upheaval. The president, Aristide, had been overthrown by a CIA-backed coup three years before and the military junta was slaughtering his supporters. Many Haitians fled to Miami by boat.’

‘That I remember,’ said Max. He’d seen it on TV in prison, bloated Haitian corpses washing up daily on Florida’s golden shores, the tourists who found them threatening to sue the state for ruined holidays and associated psychological traumas.

‘Those who made it to Florida were not given the welcome Cubans are. They didn’t get the “dry foot-wet foot” option. It was “wet foot-wet foot” for them. They were put in detention camps until your government had invaded Haiti, the idea being that they’d all be shipped back once the Marines had restored order, installed a convenient puppet as president and had “free and democratic” elections.

‘Vanetta – through her connections here – offered these Haitian refugees an alternative. They could come to Cuba instead of going home. A secret deal was struck with the Clinton administration and over the next few months, boats made the round trip from Mariel Harbour to Miami, bringing back anyone who wanted to come. A hundred or so people arrived every month.’

‘What was in it for Castro? If it was secret, surely he couldn’t use it as propaganda,’ said Max.

‘That was the agreement he made with Clinton, yes. Of course, he was eventually going to tell the world how he’d treated Haitian refugees humanely, taken them in when America refused them. You know how it goes.’ Pinel smiled. ‘But it backfired. You remember the original Mariel boat-lift?’

‘Sure.’ Max nodded. Yes, he remembered that too – and how. Between 1977 and 1980, when relations with the US had thawed, Castro allowed 125,000 Cubans to leave and join their families in Miami. They sailed from Mariel in a flotilla of overfilled, leaky boats. But this act of goodwill had a hidden catch: Castro took the opportunity to offload the dregs of the country’s prisons and psychiatric hospitals along with the exiles. Some twenty thousand criminals and psychos were processed by US immigration services and set loose on an unsuspecting population and an unprepared police force. Already a cocaine war zone, Miami came close to falling apart. It had been a nightmare, the worst.

‘The Clinton administration decided to get a little revenge on Castro for that,’ said Pinel. ‘They’d already been quietly purging American prisons of Haitian criminals and sending them back to their homeland by plane. They diverted some of them to the Cuban boats. They sent us some real monsters.’

‘Jesus.’ Max immediately thought of Solomon Boukman. ‘How many?’

‘I don’t know. We had a brief but memorable crimewave here in the mid-nineties. Murders, robberies and rapes. Tourists attacked. It was hushed up, of course. The boat-lifts were stopped and most of the perpetrators were tracked down and killed on the spot. But not all. A few disappeared into the Cuban underworld.’

‘The Abakuás?’

‘That’s right. They recruited the cream of that bad crop.’

‘Is that why Castro fell out with Vanetta, because he blamed her?’

‘No. They fell out because Vanetta reportedly helped some of these criminals escape the Cuban police.’

‘Why?’

‘No idea. She never told me any of this herself. I heard a rumour. It may not be true.’

‘Did she have links with the Abakuás?’

‘Everyone has links with them. One way or another, whether they want to or not,’ said Pinel. ‘Again, another rumour – but this one possibly more credible – is that they funded the Caille Jacobinne centres.’

‘Really?’

‘Nothing
was running in the country during the Special Period. Except for Caille Jacobinne. Haitian refugees still came and settled here. I suspect Castro found out where the money to do this was coming from and that was the end of his friendship with Vanetta.’

Max remembered what Rosa Cruz had told him about the complicated alliances Brown had forged.

‘Did it surprise you, when you heard any of this?’

‘Not really.’ Pinel shook his head. ‘This is Cuba, Mr Mingus. Nothing is as it seems and no one is who they say they are. That’s part of its charm. You’ll get used to it.’

34

He left Pinel’s house shortly before sunset, under a reddening sky, with the sound of crickets in his ears. The old man encouraged him to walk the length of 5th Avenue, get a boat across the Almendares river to Vedado and then pick up the Malecón and follow it all the way around back to the hotel. A good eight-mile trek, Pinel said, but it would be good exercise and a great experience all wrapped into one – ‘aerobic tourism’, he’d called it.

Max had set off, using the Russian embassy as a bearing. He’d decided to catch a cab or a bus downtown as soon as he got on to the main drag.

Yet there were no taxis to be had. The few that passed were already taken. He walked for an hour until he came to a bus stop, crowded with people, all office workers heading home. It was hard to tell management from menial because their clothes looked like they’d come from the same first-jobber catalogue. Pressed slacks, long-sleeved shirts and cheap leather shoes polished to their last sparkle for the men; knee-length skirts, blouses and high-heeled pumps for the women.

Max joined them, standing to one side, sweating, catching his breath, stretching his slightly aching legs. Curious sideways glances swept and assessed him. He studiously avoided all eye contact and stared either up at the sky and the stars that were starting to show or to the far end of the road, from where, he hoped, a bus would soon appear. He heard a distinct volume drop in the previously lively conversations, voices doused to whispers and the word-count dwindling from paragraphs to one-liners, and then monosyllables, before hitting a solid zero. The group lost its previous cohesion as bodies moved away from one another and became remote islands, facing every direction but his. He realised his presence at this hour was unusual, a foreigner slumming it on state-sponsored transport. They probably thought he was a spy or someone they couldn’t risk being themselves around. He felt suddenly bad about being there, intruding on their lives, fucking up their quality time, filling them with needless dread.

The bus turned up just as he thought of leaving. It was a
camello,
or camel, a vintage Special Period innovation meant to cut fuel costs, so named because the vehicle was little more than a recycled bus hull welded and bolted on to the bed of a massive articulated lorry, the middle section dipping between the wheel-points, giving the front and back distinctive humps. The commuters on the bus, pressed so tightly against the windows that their faces were crushed, reminded him of hostages. He didn’t think anyone was going to be able to board, but the office crowd, numbering more than a dozen, made their way to the doors, which opened slowly and with difficulty on to a wall of tightly packed bodies, not a sliver of space between them. Somehow, one by one, the people disappeared inside, a little at a time, first a foot, then a leg, a hand, arm and shoulder, before their whole bodies were slowly sucked into that condensed mass of humanity – with a little help from the driver, who had got out of the cabin to ease them in with small pushes. There wasn’t a single complaint from the bus, not even a moan of discomfort or show of inconvenience. When the last person had been swallowed up, the driver turned to Max and asked if he wanted to get on, but Max shook his head. The driver pushed the doors shut, then climbed back into his cabin and the bus took off down the road, belching thick fumes.

Max resumed his trek, hoping for a cab but resigned to the long haul. It was now dark and the warm air smelled both sweet and briny, the sea breeze mingling with the scent of sap and flowers. Off in the distance he could see downtown Havana, the whole tourist seafront area a bright orange spill of electric lava heading for the water’s edge.

At the end of 5th Avenue, Max paid a man with a small motor boat twenty pesos to take him across the river so he could start on the long home stretch.

He heard the bar before he saw it, on the corner of a side road feeding into the Malecón, the loud music drowning out the sound of the passing traffic and the waves; not salsa or jazz, but a tune he recognised from years before – Duran Duran’s ‘Skin Trade’, a song he’d liked a lot before he found out who was singing. He’d mistaken it for late-period Chic or peak-period Prince.

He couldn’t have missed the bar anyway. It had two lit-up Christmas trees either side of the door, and strings of twinkling fairy lights in the windows, whose panes were bordered with snow spray. He stopped and gawped.

A small group of men and women stood opposite, close to a parked Super 88, the dim light obscuring all but their outlines and the metallic twinkle of the women’s short sequinned dresses. He smelled their perfume and cigarettes, then sewage and a hint of jasmine coming off the street.

The place was called La Urraca – whatever that meant. Thirsty, sweaty and desperately needing a piss, he decided to go in.

It was practically deserted, the only customers, a man and a woman standing close together talking in a corner at the end of the bar. The bartender – decked out in red trousers, braces and a white T-shirt – eyed Max as he came in.

The décor was Christmas-on-steroids: gold wrapping paper and red velveteen bows for wallpaper, bands of gold and silver tinsel forming half-smiles on the ceiling, two strings of dusty cards along a wall; opposite a popped advent calendar, a painting of Santa riding a reindeer chariot through the night sky, and another fully decorated tree, with a mound of presents, in the corner. The loud music made all the decorations tremble.

It was one strange fucken’ sight.

‘Agua mineral per favor,’
Max said to the bartender.

‘No agua.’ The man shook his head and raised his eyes to a row of plain brown bottles lining the shelves above him, no indication as to the contents. He had thinning sandy hair, almost translucent eyelashes, indigo eyes and the flushed face of a dawn-to-dark drinker.

‘Usted tiene una soda?’

‘Qué?’

‘Soda:
Coca-Cola, Sprite?’

The bartender looked at him without expression.

‘Hablas Inglés?’

‘No.’

Max glanced over at the couple. The woman had her back to him. She was over six foot tall, slender and had long, lustrous black hair cascading almost to the small of her back. She was wearing a short gold dress, high heels and black-seamed stockings with a gold butterfly at each ankle. The man was shorter and broader. He had on a denim shirt and jeans. His hands moved animatedly as he spoke. Max could hear his voice cutting through the music, the tone angry. The woman stood absolutely still.

‘Toilet?’ Max asked the bartender, who nodded to a door to his right.

The festive motif didn’t carry over to the john, a narrow cubicle with a filthy, clogged toilet bowl and a broken chain dangling from a rusty cistern. It stank so bad he held his breath and didn’t look down, targeting his jet by ear and taking in the graffiti instead: addresses, phone numbers, male and female names, drawings of doggy-styling and cocksucking.

When he went back out, the music was playing louder, the sound distorted, Duran Duran singing something about doctors of the reva-loootion baybee.

There was a glass of something clear and fizzy waiting for him on the bar.

Max didn’t want it, whatever it was. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a ten-peso note and pushed it over the counter. The bartender palmed the cash and pointed to the glass.

Max was about to say something apologetic and valedictory when he heard the dry crack, followed by a short, piercing scream. He turned and saw the woman staggering towards the door, holding her face, the man yelling, about to follow her. He saw Max looking at him and stopped where he was.