Havana Best Friends

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 insert his key into the lock of the confiscated Miramar apartment he had been assigned by the Housing Institute in 1960, and his kids would spend a couple of days playing with Daddy.

Neither she nor Pablo were old enough to discern the reasons behind their parents’ divorce. It hadn’t been a normal home, but the break-up was still a shock because Gladys, who never talked much about her husband and didn’t seem to be particularly distraught by his prolonged absences, all of a sudden spent hours cursing the son of a bitch, a term that, like countless other expletives, she had learned in the dressing rooms of the Tropicana. She also blamed some nameless whore for her misfortune.

After Pablo completed second grade – or was it third? – school became an important dividing factor. The boy resented his sister’s tutoring, which Gladys forced Elena to give him at home. He also detested her dedication to school issues, and her being elected Head of the Detachment of Pioneers, the children’s communist organization. It was worse in junior high. Having inherited her mother’s genes, at twelve Elena was the most beautiful and popular girl from among 165 female students. Pablo at nine was an exact copy of his father: Short, lean, and bold to the point of having been nicknamed ‘El Loco’ – The Wacko.

In the following three or four years, the two personalities became the centre of contrasting groups. Pablo was the undisputed leader of five or six angry, frustrated, and rebellious teenagers, kids from one-parent homes most of them, who played hooky, roamed the streets, and flunked exams. Elena was his exact opposite. She became president of her school’s chapter of the Federation of High School Students at fifteen, valedictorian of her class at seventeen. They were living in a peculiar symbiosis: different species under the same roof, avoiding each other, always on a collision course.

Tragedy struck one evening in 1980, just after General Miranda returned unannounced from Angola only to find his second wife, an extremely beautiful brunette thirteen years younger than him, in his own bed with a next-door neighbour. The general drew his nine-millimetre Maka-rov and emptied its first clip into the two pleading lovers. Their legs and arms kept jerking spasmodically, so Miranda changed clips and made sure neither lived to tell the tale. Then he drove his Lada to the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and turned himself in.

In the ensuing three or four months the lives of Elena and Pablo became kaleidoscopes of incomprehension, apprehension, and irritability that little by little evolved into indifference and insensitivity, then to some measure of euphoria and consolation when they learned the general had been sentenced to thirty years in prison, not the death penalty, which was what a much-hated prosecutor recommended.

Like most Cubans, Gladys was firmly convinced that lambasting the living is not as unacceptable as speaking ill of the dead. So, relieved that Elena and Pablo had been spared from further traumas, she would venomously repeat to them, eighteen and fifteen years old respectively, how men become assholes when they think with their little head instead of their bigger one. ‘You’ll regret this,’ she claimed to have warned her husband the day he packed his belongings and moved out, ‘when you catch the slut cheating on you and remember that you renounced the decent home and wife you once had.’

Since the mid-1960s, the Cuban media has been instructed to ignore all sorts of scandals involving top communist officials; the notion that all of them were paradigms of human perfection couldn’t be jeopardized. But the story was too juicy to put a lid on. Generals and colonels stationed in faraway lands considered it prudent to relate the tragic drama to their usually younger and beautiful wives and/or mistresses, who in turn told it to their friends and relatives. From the island’s easternmost town to its westernmost village, hundreds of thousands learned what had happened by tuning in to Radio Bemba – Lip Radio – among them a neighbour of Gladys and her kids who considered it his duty to inform a few discreet friends on the block. The news spread like wildfire.

Then a very curious phenomenon occurred. The teenagers who as children had learned the meaning of the word envy with Elena and Pablo – observing them ride in their father’s cars; staring at the olive-drab, tarpaulin-covered trucks which delivered heavy cartons in late December; ogling the toys, clothes, and shoes they wore; savouring the huge, exquisite birthday cakes and slurping as many bottles of soda as they wanted to on Pablo and Elena’s birthdays – those same teenagers split into two groups. A minority provided unwavering support and encouragement. The greater number turned their back on the Miranda family after gleefully expressing a complacency which reduced itself to a simple statement: At last those who had been born with a silver spoon in their mouths would learn what building socialism was really all about.

That same year Elena gained admittance to the University of Havana to do a BA in Education. She felt like Alice stepping into Wonderland. Nobody seemed to care whose daughter she was or where she came from. There followed the transition from high-school senior who gave the cold shoulder to juniors, to junior who got the same treatment; there was the professor in his early forties, the first mature man she felt attracted to; there were the huge buildings, the enormous library and stadium, the serious political rallies. At last she was able to shed the school uniform, ride a bus daily, have lunch wherever she felt like and her allowance permitted. She also had to study a lot harder.

The Wacko, however, remained in the same school and was demoted from rightful heir to a generalship to son of a murderer. His response was extremely violent: in the course of two months he had fist fights with two teachers and nine schoolmates, something that could not be overlooked. But before expelling the boy, the principal wrote a letter to the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces. Thirty-five-year-old Major Domingo Rosas, from Army Counter-Intelligence and a psychologist by profession, was ordered to ‘look after’ the son and daughter of former general Manuel Miranda.

Major Rosas visited Gladys first. He explained that in consideration for the outstanding merits of her erstwhile husband, the ‘Direction of the Revolution’ – an expression generally meaning Number One in person, yet vague enough to shift the blame to Numbers Two, Three or Four should something go wrong – had instructed that a liaison officer for Elena, Pablo, and their father must be appointed. He would take them to visit ex-General Miranda in prison when and if they felt like it; he would also try to win their trust and provide counselling. Gladys should feel free to call him when any problem seriously affecting her son and daughter couldn’t be solved through regular channels.

Next, Major Rosas went to the high school and interviewed its principal and Pablo’s teachers. The information he gleaned convinced Rosas he’d be tackling a real deviant. He explained things to his commanding officer and was relieved of all his other assignments for a month, at the end of which he made a report and a prognosis. It was an excellent report and it had an optimistic prognosis; it omitted one very significant fact, though. In thirty days Major Rosas had fallen madly in love with Elena Miranda.

‘Comrade Elena, could you come over?’ Captain Trujillo asked from the door to Pablo’s closet, sounding intrigued.

Elena approached him. The DTI officer had taken a VHS-format video cassette from a huge carton containing many more. It was cryptically labelled thirty-five.

‘There must be forty or fifty videos in this box,’ Trujillo said. ‘Was your brother a big video fan?’

‘I wouldn’t know, Captain.’

‘Didn’t he show these to you?’

Elena sighed, crossed her arms over her chest, took a deep breath. ‘Listen, Captain, I think I ought to level with you from the start,’ she said gloomily. ‘As Pablo’s sister, with both of us living under the same roof, it’s perfectly natural for you to think I’m the ideal person to give you background information on my brother, what he did in his spare time, who he hung out with, if he was doing okay at his job, the sort of thing from which you can find out what happened to him. Unfortunately, my brother and I didn’t get along. He lived his life; I lived mine. We didn’t have mutual friends. We didn’t share our hopes and aspirations and problems. I cooked for myself, he cooked for himself. As you can see, he kept his room locked. My TV set is the old black-and-white in the living room, I don’t own a VCR. Pablo never showed me those videos. For many years we agreed on one issue only: swapping this apartment for two smaller units, so each of us could live alone. But we never found the right swap; either he didn’t like the apartment he’d move to or I disliked mine. So, I’m probably the least informed person about my brother.’

Trujillo lifted his eyes to the witnesses. Kuan remained impassive, but Zoila gave him a slight nod. The captain reinserted the cassette into its box, returned it to the carton, then produced another one. Its label read thirty-four.

‘Sorry to hear that, Comrade Elena. It slows down the investigation. Let’s see what’s here. Probably a movie.’

Elena shrugged her shoulders and returned to the doorway. Trujillo found the remote control under a shirt on top of the writing table. He inserted the cassette and pressed the play button.

Blue. White clouds on a clear sky, the camera gliding slowly down to the horizon, the sea, then panning gradually to a sandy beach. Two young women holding hands approach the camera, laughing and jumping over tame little waves which break and die under their feet. Both wear straw hats, dark glasses, and minimal two-piece bathing suits. Fade out. Same girls under a shower, naked, playfully splashing water on each other. The game loses momentum, with a lecherous stare the brunette gently caresses the blonde, they embrace and kiss hungrily…

Trujillo stopped the VCR and ejected the cassette. ‘I will take all these tapes with me to the Department,’ he said.

The captain resumed the search. Elena tore off another layer of forgetfulness from her mind. At what age had sex become the driving force in her brother’s life? She didn’t know. It had been early on, though. She recalled the disgusted looks of her high-school girlfriends when a drooling Pablo ogled them. One afternoon she caught him masturbating in the hall as an unsuspecting schoolmate, sitting on the living room’s Chesterfield in faded denim short shorts, legs tucked under her, concentrated on a list of questions for an upcoming exam. How old was he? Thirteen? Perhaps only twelve.

Elena shook her head in denial and clicked her tongue. This made Zoila steal a glance at her that went unnoticed.

Had her brother been bisexual? Judging by appearances alone, among the people who visited him at home there were as many gay men and lesbians as heterosexuals. But she suspected that Pablo, despite his promiscuity, had never been in love. Probably he belonged to those who, following a few days, weeks or months at the most, long for the delicious early stage of all relationships and must chase after someone new to fantasize about.

It seemed as though he was one of the increasing number of individuals capable of comprehending the meaning of infatuation, lust, sex, perhaps even romance, but not love. Men and women who try to conceal, under a veneer of sophistication or cynicism, their inability to involve themselves spiritually beyond a certain point, who believe that the absence of commitment is the greatest expression of individual freedom. Unmarried, generally childless people who profess to love their blood relations and friends, those socially stereotypical human bonds which hardly ever demand forgiveness and understanding and self-sacrifice on a daily basis.

Elena wondered whether she belonged to a disappearing breed that people like Pablo, if given the chance, feast on. She thought she had fallen in love, with varying intensity, on three occasions out of a total of eighteen men. She had never been casual, never gone to bed with a guy just for the hell of it, for what he could provide materially, or because she felt lonely or sad. Not once had she pushed aside feelings, a minimum of physical attraction, and yet…life had not rewarded her senti-mentalism, naïveté, foolishness, or whatever it was with the lasting, mature, intense, fulfilling relationship she had always dreamed of. Were people like Pablo the precursors to a new stage in what humans call love? Heirs to the characters so masterfully described over two centuries earlier by Pierre de Laclos in Les Liaisons Dangereuses? The kind of people the human race demands to counteract disappointment, infidelity, jealousy, the high divorce rates, the one-parent homes, and the population explosion?

As though prodded by death, Elena continued the second serious philosophical exploration of her life. Certainly the institution of marriage, probably the oldest social stereotype, seemed to be in intensive care. She had never married, but it appeared to her that forced cohabitation and self-repression based on moral obligations did not provide the foundation for extending love beyond the initial passion experienced by almost everybody. Contrary to what the famous song argued, love and marriage don’t go together like horse and carriage. Eventually people should? could? would? establish long-lasting love affairs built on affinities and feelings, not on a signed document.

Kuan gasped; Zoila covered her mouth with her hand; Elena returned to reality. Trujillo had found a thick manila envelope under the mattress and had extracted from it a wad of hundred– and fifty-dollar bills an inch thick.

‘Comrade Kuan, Comrade Zoila, would you please count this money?’ Trujillo requested.

The witnesses stared as if they had been asked to fly to the moon.

‘You have a problem with that, comrades?’

Kuan shook his head; Zoila said ‘No.’ They approached the captain, took the cash, and started counting it by the writing desk.

The search brought no further surprises. Trujillo sat on a chair, produced from his briefcase two sheets of semi-bond paper with the DTI’s letterhead, a sheet of carbon paper, and recorded in longhand the seizure of forty-three video cassettes and twenty-nine hundred US dollars in cash found in the bedroom of Pablo Carlos Miranda Garcés. The serial numbers of fifty-four bills followed. All four present signed, Elena was given the copy, and the captain and the neighbours left. Around a minute later, as she sat on the Chesterfield holding her head in her hands, elbows on her knees, the buzzer startled her. It was Trujillo, asking whether it would be possible for Elena to be at the IML at eight the following morning to identify the body. She limited her reply to a nod and closed the door.

Half an hour later, still angst-ridden, lying in bed on her right side with the night lamp on, Elena suddenly realized she was doing something she hadn’t done in the last thirty-one years – sucking her thumb. She pulled it out in disgust. What was the matter with her? Regressing to childhood? Totally freaked out? Next she turned the lamp off and tried to relax.

Her unruly memory began replaying her greatest personal calamity, the one which had made her reflect philosophically for the first time about life, love, and God. Her angelic son, the most beautiful child in the whole world, in his white small coffin, eyelids closed, flowing golden locks framing his head. No! Death wouldn’t govern her thoughts any more tonight. No more wading through the saddest moments of her past, either. To divert her mind from all the problems assailing her, Elena turned the light back on. She would make espresso and read until daybreak, then call her mother.

Captain Felix Trujillo drove the Ural back to his outfit, on Marino Street between Tulipán and Conill, got receipts from the storeroom clerk for the video cassettes and the money, returned the motorcycle, then walked back home. He lived ten blocks away from DTI headquarters, in a one-storey wooden house with a red-tile roof at 453 Falgueras Street, municipality of Cerro.

No living soul could say for certain when the house was built, but late nineteenth century would be a good guess, just before most of the remaining dwellings on the block were erected. Over the years the twenty-foot structure had tilted to the right – by reason of the gradual sinking of the subsoil, the building inspector diagnosed – and now it leaned against a quite similar wooden house, as if tired after a century of sheltering people. This oddity, considered amusing by some passers-by, worried its residents and neighbours. Whenever a hurricane threatened Havana or torrential rains fell, Trujillo and his family were evacuated to the fire station on Calzada del Cerro.

When gas mains arrived in the neighbourhood in the 1920s, a meter and the incoming pipe were fixed to its front without any consideration for aesthetics, a sure sign that even then its owner was not a man of means. A two-foot-high grate embedded in bricks and cement separated the yard-wide portal from the sidewalk. What appeared to be three huge front doors were in fact one front door and two openings into the main room, glorified windows almost. The place where Trujillo, his parents, wife, son, and daughter lived, in addition to the main room, had a dining room, three small bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen. Refurbishing it inside and out would most likely have cost twenty times its original cost, an investment way beyond what a police captain could afford. In fact, Trujillo couldn’t even afford the coats of paint and the new roof and floor tiles that were urgently needed.

Trujillo slipped his key into the lock and went in at ten to twelve. Everybody was in bed, the kitchen light left on for him. There were rice, black beans, and a hard-boiled egg in a covered frying pan; a pot full of water for his bath – the perfect mother. He lit the range and as the water warmed the captain smoked a cigarette. In the bathroom he poured the hot water into an almost full bucket of water, then tiptoed into his bedroom where he found clean underwear and a fast asleep wife. Following his bath he felt hungry. He seldom had dinner twice, but ignoring what the following day had in store for him, he warmed and ate the food, made some espresso, then smoked a second cigarette.

As he was doing the dishes and placing them on the wire drainer, Trujillo resumed the line of reasoning he had started on his way home. If the whole batch of videos were porno, Pablo Miranda must have been one of three things: best client, salesman, or native producer. The money found in his bedroom might also be related to the videos, and his being able to meet and/or associate with foreigners at his workplace pointed in the same direction. A considerable percentage of Italian and Spanish tourists were single men who notoriously came to Cuba looking for cheap sex.

All this and the cocaine inclined the captain to believe that Pablo had engaged in something reprehensible, illegal, and sex-related. His murder had all the trappings of a typical settlement of accounts, very professionally carried out. The murderer might just have been following orders from someone who decreed Pablo Miranda’s execution. After finding the videos, it seemed crystal-clear to Trujillo that the contradictory indications – the bite-marks, the stolen wallet and watch, the two hundred dollars left in a pocket – were an attempt to send the police on a wild-goose chase after a sex maniac or a dumb thief. Had the short bald guy hatched a scheme to blackmail somebody? Had he demanded a bigger share of the profits? And what was his role in the scam? Cameraman? Editor? Talent scout?

Police knew that the production of Cuban porno films had become a new business venture in the last few years. Customs confiscated copies at the airport, officers raiding whorehouses and flophouses found some more, but so far no producer had been caught. At national police headquarters a special unit had been put together under a full colonel. Trujillo had listened to the complaints of his boss, Major Pena, one of the officers working on it in the Cuban capital. From among the ‘actors’ and ‘actresses’, three hookers and two male prostitutes had been identified, busted, and questioned. Each of them had repeated the same story.

A man they had never seen before or again talked them into it. He told them to wait for a blue van with tinted windows at an intersection. Once inside the vehicle they were blindfolded and driven around for half an hour before reaching the garage of a house. The cameraman, light tech, and sound tech had worn masks and spoken to each other in whispers. Once the shooting was over, they had been returned blindfolded to the pick-up point. No, they had no idea where the house was. No, they didn’t see the van’s plates. And the pay? A hundred dollars.

Describe the contact man, Pena had asked. The first hustler said he had brown eyes, the second swore they were green, the third didn’t notice. According to the two men he was clean shaven; one of the women said he had a moustache. Three of them described him as being in his forties, the other two said he was in his fifties. Not even on the man’s height and weight could the models reach agreement. Knowing that they were being spun a line, Major Pena and his subordinates wheedled and threatened, all to no avail. Finally the offenders were indicted, tried and sentenced; the women to one year in prison, the men to three. And the investigation stalled. Pena and his special unit could do nothing but wait for a fresh lead. They would be overjoyed at Trujillo’s break-through.

Returning to the bathroom, he washed his hands, then went to bed. He set the alarm clock on his bedside table for six a.m. With hands clasped in his lap, his mind moved to Elena Miranda.

It seemed as though the murdered man and his sister did not like each other at all. One more case of relatives who regard each other with suspicion bordering on out-right hostility. She seemed decent enough, clean-cut, self-effacing, sensible, still a very attractive woman. In her twenties she must have been stunning, Trujillo speculated. Pablo’s antithesis? It seemed so.

The lock on her brother’s bedroom proved what she had said: ‘He lived his life; I lived mine.’ His room was a mess; the rest of the house was neat. Well, the walls needed a lick of paint and the furniture new upholstery, but what Cuban home didn’t? Separate cooking, wanting to swap the nice apartment for two, it all indicated conflicting personalities. He had seen it many times among divorced couples and in-laws forced to keep living under the same roof because of the housing shortage; less frequently among parents and their offspring. Under this kind of forced cohabitation tempers get rather frayed, providing a recurring reason for police intervention;