Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
The Cadiz prefect informed me that at eight o'clock the
following morning I would be sent to Havana, for which,by
happy chance, a steamer was sailing that day.
"Where?"
"To Havana."
"Ha-van-a?"
"Havana."
"I won't go voluntarily."
-Leon Trotsky, My Life
I am George Washington. I am Abe Lincoln and Alexander Hamilton and Andrew Jackson and, if things work out perfectly, I just might end up being Benjamin Franklin. I know: Little Daddy is trying to be nice. He laughs at my jokes and gets us beer and, yes, earlier we even had one of those serendipitous moments that can spark a warm friendship. But I'm an American and Little Daddy needs dollars like everyone else in Cuba, so in the moments when I look away at some sixteen-year-old hooker or take a pull at my Buchanero, I can feel him turn off the charm long enough to cut me up into currency. Five dollars? Twenty dollars? Maybe I'm good for more drinks, a shirt, a dinner, even straight cash. I try not to mind. After all, we sit right at the heart of the Havana hustle, in a bar called Castillo de Farnes that, at this time of night, serves as a hub for every kind of dealer, pimp, prostitute, gigolo, and beggar. And I am money.
Little Daddy is a baseball fanatic. Every day, with about a hundred other men, he makes his way to the shade of Havana's Parque Central to take part in La Pena, which is the semiofficial name for what was once called La Esquina Caliente-the Hot Corner-and what is no more than a bunch of red-faced aficionados standing in front of park benches for hours on end, yelling at one another aboutCuban baseball, about who is great and who sucks, about those who left the country and those who stayed behind. Little Daddy keeps detailed statistics, watches games every night. But at forty-five he is also younger than most of the men at La Pena, with the face of a beefed-up Shaft, and he has six kids and no job. "My wife and I, we fuck, fuck, fuck," he says, defeated. "It's loco."
We sit at a table near the door, watching the parade of jineteras— lady jockeys-clop by in chunky high heels and stunningly similar pink, lime, or orange Day-Glo spandex outfits. They are very thin or very fat. They walk slow to the bar and ask for water, rake the crowd with dead eyes, wait for someone to start talking.
"It's good for the heart."
I look over and Little Daddy is nodding, smiling, tapping his chest. First I think he's talking about sex, but after an instant I realize he means our little stroke of luck. Earlier in the day, we'd been to Havana's grand ballpark, Estadio Latinoamericano, to see Havana's Metropolitanos team play its final regular season doubleheader against Matanzas. The place held no more than three hundred people, and as the second game began we were heading for the street when I saw something I'd never seen before on a baseball field. A player rolled a bunt so gently, so perfectly down the third base line that no one could be sure it wouldn't go foul; and he was so fast that by the time the mesmerized fielders snapped to, he stood on second with a clean double.
"He's tied the record!" Little Daddy yelled then, grabbing my arm, and so it was: Seventeen-year-old center fielder Yasser Gomez, the youngest Cuban big leaguer since the great Omar Linares broke in as a sixteen-year-old in 1985, had tied the twenty-nine-year-old National Series record for hits by a rookie. My first ball game this year, and I stumble on gold. So Little Daddy spent the rest of the afternoon finding out where Gomez lives, and by 9:30 P.M. we were choking on fumes in the back of a' 46 Dodge gypsy cab on the way to a small apartment on Calle Espada.
We knocked on the door, unexpected. Yasser was on the couch, watching TV with his attractively bored girlfriend; his shirtless, cannonball-gutted father strode about, beer in hand. A poster of then Dodgers catcher Mike Piazza hung on the living room wall. I tried to apologize for the late hour, but Little Daddy and Yasser's mother, Lola, just gasped at each other, eyes wide. As a teenager, Little Daddy had dated Lola's sister, been close friends with Lola, and the two hadn't seen either since. We're in. The family would love to talk. We made plans and left.
"I knew her thirty years ago!" Little Daddy sighs now. "Can you believe it?" We shake our heads and drink in tandem, marveling at the idea of ever being teenagers. It's our one unique experience, wholly devoid of commerce, and I sense a breakthrough. I try to get crafty. Women flow around us like river around stones, so I say things seem worse since I was here two years ago: more hookers in the street. More in this room, notably.
For it was on the early morning of January 9, 1959, in the dim morning hours after rolling into Havana and giving his first major speech in the capital as Maximum Leader-a white dove landed on his shoulder then, sending an otherworldly shiver through millions—that a thirty-two-year-old Castro came to the Castillo de Farnes with his brother Raul and Che Guevara.He had eaten many meals here as a law student, no doubt haranguing his companeros about the Batista era's corruption and prostitution, vowing that things would be different if only he were in charge.And now he had won.A picture of the men on that triumphant morning hangs in a hallway here, but it has none of the calculated romance found in the work of revolutionary photographers Raul Corrales or Alberto Korda...
