Havana Best Friends. Jose Latour

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      ‘We’re positive, comrade.’

      ‘Can I see him?’

      ‘Actually, if you are his only relative in Havana, you must identify him. His body is at the IML. Tomorrow morning…’

      ‘Where?’

      ‘The morgue. You can go there tomorrow morning. At eight. It’s on Boyeros and the Luminous Fountain. Are you his only relative?’

      ‘In Havana, yes. There’s our mother…and father.’

      ‘Can you notify them?’

      ‘Well, I can call my mother, but my father is in prison.’

      To conceal his surprise, Trujillo unclasped his briefcase, opened his diary, drew out his ballpoint. Next he cast a baleful eye at the informers, but they were staring at Elena as if it were news to them too. Both had moved to the neighbourhood years after Elena’s father was sentenced and nobody had bothered to tell them the story.

      ‘Tell me his name and where he’s serving time. Maybe I can get him a special pass to attend the wake and the funeral.’

      ‘His name is Manuel Miranda and he is at Tinguaro.’

      Trujillo took his time writing the three words. Tingu-aro was a small, special prison fifteen kilometres to the south of Havana for those who had occupied high-ranking positions in the Cuban party, government, or armed forces before having to serve time for some non-political crime. Men deserving special consideration because they had won battles, done heroic deeds, followed orders to the letter, been willing to die for the Revolution. Yes, the name Manuel Miranda definitely rang a tiny bell at the back of his mind.

      ‘I’ll see what I can do, comrade. Now, I’m conducting an investigation and as part of it I need to examine your brother’s personal belongings. His papers, clothing, anything that can shed light on what happened to him. Comrades Kuan and Zoila are here as witnesses. We would appreciate it if you could take us to his bedroom and any other room where he kept his things…’

      Elena was shaking her head emphatically, two tears sliding down her cheeks. ‘I don’t have the key to his bedroom. We…well, Captain, he put a lock on the door to his room. I don’t have the key to it.’

      Trujillo produced Pablo’s key ring. ‘Do you recognize this?’

      Elena nodded. The last shadow of a doubt evaporated in her mind.

      ‘It was found in a pocket.’

      ‘Come with me, please.’

      When Elena switched on the light, the visitors saw that Pablo’s bedroom was a mess. It hadn’t been cleaned in a long while and disorder reigned. Ten or fifteen cockroaches scurried in search of hiding places. Under a table supporting a colour TV and a VCR were a roll of tissue paper, old newspapers, and a broken CD player; a pile of soiled sheets and towels and underwear lay on top of the unmade bed; slippers under a writing table; three ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, several empty and crushed packets of Populares on the floor; shoes and socks all over. It reeked of human sweat and grease, and dirt.

      As Trujillo professionally searched the bedroom and the embarrassed witnesses stared, Elena, leaning in the doorway, occasionally fighting back tears and biting her lip, wondered why she and her brother had become enemies, when the split had begun, what part of the blame was hers. Memories kept coming, the way waves wash over a beach, only to ebb away and be absorbed by the sand.

      

      Elena couldn’t recall the rejection she must have felt right from the very beginning. She was three when what had been a big balloon of striated flesh all of a sudden deflated and transformed itself into a screaming, crying, red-faced newborn demanding her mother’s full attention. Had the little thing sensed that she probably hated him? Was it possible for a suckling infant to somehow intuit repulsion?

      Her sources were family stories. Funny anecdotes told by Gladys of which she had no memory whatsoever. Like the morning when she found Elena sucking from the bottle she was supposed to be using to feed her brother. It was how their mother learned why the boy was always hungry so soon after having been fed by his improperly supervised sister. Or the day she covered his face with her excrement. Or the evening she fed him a quarter pound of raisins, which Pablo happily chomped away on, and nearly dehydrated from acute diarrhoea. As teenagers, when these and other stories were recounted, Elena and Pablo swapped cursory smiles, made jokes, but in her brother’s eyes there was a strange gleam, as if he were thinking: See, see how it was you who started it all?

      According to her mother, Elena was amazed to discover Pablo’s penis. Why? What did he need it for? Once he learned to stand and walk, she had wanted to pee standing up, too. Family stories, however, excluded one which Elena remembered vividly. The day when, at age seven, she was found fondling her brother, aged four. Her mother spanked her like never before, so she figured she had done something terrible and for many years the memory hid at the back of her mind as some unspeakable atrocity she had to atone for. After the Professor of Child Psychology at the University of Havana expounded on sexual games among children, Elena experienced a huge spiritual relief. The feeling of guilt disappeared and her sexuality improved noticeably.

      Perhaps as part of her atonement and to stave off their growing antagonism, but if so unconsciously, she tried hard to become her brother’s favourite playmate. The Parque de la Quinta was their playground. She learned to throw a baseball and skate and ride a bike as he learned to swing a bat, ride a scooter, then a tricycle. They were the object of undisguised envy by many other children in the neighbourhood, those who didn’t have fathers with the special connections required to obtain for their offspring what was unavailable for 99.9 per cent of Cuban children in the 1970s.

      In practical terms, however, their childhood was fatherless. Manuel Miranda had been a major in the revolutionary army – the highest rank – since 1958, aged twenty-one. Promoted to the rank of lieutenant two months after joining the rebels in the Sierra Maestra, he was made captain four months later, then appointed major two weeks before Batista fled and the regular Army collapsed. By the time the rebels reached Havana he was a living legend: a hundred stories portrayed him as a fearless, highly adventurous young man who laughed uproariously in the face of death.

      Major Miranda had a few wild months in 1959 Havana. Only five feet four, his self-assurance, shoulder-length hair, and personal history made him the third most sought-after man in the Cuban capital (after Fidel Castro and Camilo Cienfüegos). Gladys Garcés, at the time one of the chorus girls of the world-renowned Tropicana, was two inches taller and two years older than the major, had a statuesque figure, and danced the way palm fronds sway in the afternoon breeze – with an almost magic sensu-ousness. They met, made love, and the country boy lost his heart for the first time. He didn’t want to wake up from the dream and persuaded the young woman to quit the cabaret and marry him in June. After four years of nightclub life and several dozen men, Gladys was too well versed in the vagaries of passion to fall madly in love with anyone, but she felt in her bones that marrying a swashbuckling hero considerably reduced the uncertainty of a future in which millionaires, business executives, and their bejewelled mistresses were threatened species.

      Right then the struggle against American imperialism began. Miranda spent weeks, sometimes months, in a bunker somewhere waiting for the American invasion; in the Bay of Pigs, crushing Brigade 2506; in Algeria, fighting the Moroccans; hunting counter-revolutionaries in the mountains of Las Villas; training guerrillas to foster subversion in Latin America. Sometimes of an evening, taking time out from his action-packed life, Major Miranda would СКАЧАТЬ