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Chapter One, page 18
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next
the right,
I became separated from my friends and ended up seeking shelter in a
funeral home. There a family was in mourning for a young man who had killed
himself with his father’s gun. From the foyer of the funeral home,
I could see his
swollen head protruding over one end of the casket. It was the first dead
body I
had ever seen, and I felt a surge of bile rising up my throat.
I ran away and didn’t stop running until somehow I boarded a city bus
that
was practically empty because everyone or nearly everyone was at La Plaza,
from
which I’d just escaped. I rode the bus until it reached its final destination.
I was
so confused I had no idea where I was. When the speech ended and the buses
resumed
their normal routes, I found one that eventually took me home.
Before the year was over, the newspapers began writing a great deal about
the man who had won the race to the White House, Jimmy Carter. Cuban newspapers
always paid exaggerated attention to the comings and goings of the americanos,
but this Jimmy Carter was getting more attention than most. He was a
man, it seemed, with whom Fidel could communicate. He would control the
crazy Miami Cubans or the CIA assassins or whoever it was that had murdered
the fencing team, the government assured us.
Despite the news that held the nation transfixed, our lives went on as usual,
preoccupied by the lack of food and other inexplicable consequences of defying
the United States. We lived in a country of mysteries, of mirrors, of magicians.
Large quantities of eggs could appear in the market one morning, as if all
the
hens of Cuba had gone into a production overdrive, and then suddenly eggs
would disappear for weeks. The Americans must have poisoned the chickens,
people would say. A store in Old Havana would receive a large shipment of
hand
soap, and lines that snaked around the shaded porticoes of the city would
form
for days; then there would be no soap for months. A crucial ingredient for
soap
must have been held up by the embargo, we would hear. Butter would come and
go. Vanilla ice cream was plentiful, but strawberry was rare; the tropics
were not
kind to berry plants, we were told. There always seemed to be plain yogurt
in the
stores, but not enough milk. We had bread, but, though the ocean surrounded
us, never fish.
