Carlos stood on the corner across from the entrance to the Central Park Zoo, watching the security guard flirt with every exiting nanny. Closing time was fifteen minutes away, too late to pay his way in. So he waited until a woman pushing a baby carriage bearing twins caught the guard’s attention. The guard blocked her path, dropped into a crouch, and began speaking in Spanish to the infants. Carlos washed past unseen, not four feet away. By the time the nanny escaped to Fifth Avenue, he was inside the zoo.
Twilight dimmed the faces of the patrons who streamed past toward the exit. Carlos peered between their bobbing heads to the sea lion pool ahead. He had always liked the sea; he loved to fish. But the closest he had come to water in a long time was washing dishes. And he had just lost that job.
Dishwashing had paid the rent on his one-room sublet in the Bronx, even if it didn’t leave much for anything else. It had also brought him one huge meal every night he worked, which wasn’t part of the deal – just an arrangement with the fry cook. He didn’t mind that the temperature of the water left his hands looking like lobster claws, or how his arms burned from muscle fatigue at the end of each shift. He had worked tougher jobs. The worst had been cleaning the Armory’s toilets, soiled by men too disoriented to flush, let alone acknowledge his service. Not that he would have wanted it acknowledged; he was all too happy to be invisible while he unclogged and scrubbed those holes. Still, there was something demoralizing about being invisible to those who were invisible to others.
He knew better than to explore this feeling with Alicia. It was hard enough to explain how he felt about washing dishes. Lying on his mattress, staring at the darkness overhead, he had told her that what he didn’t like about his job was how boring it was. You just don’t like being a dishwasher, she had replied. Alicia was twenty-seven just like him, a manicurist at a beauty salon on Lexington. Her only goal, she told him straight off, was to be an American. This meant committing to climb a ladder, rung by rung. As long as she was going up, she didn’t want to hear about how far off the top was. The better he came to know her, the more he wondered what she saw in him. If he had to guess, it was probably because, four days before meeting her at a party, he had finally found a place he could afford without a roommate. This was his only real accomplishment since arriving from Mariel two years earlier, and she must have smelled it on him while they talked and kissed on a fire escape.
Although she lived in the Bronx and aspired to Union City, Alicia saw that the route to success passed through Manhattan. It wasn’t enough to work there; she bought her clothes and lottery tickets in its shops. Even her santero was on the Harlem border of the Upper West Side. Carlos had intended to meet her there one Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago. He got off the subway at 79th Street and came up to what felt like a tropical sea bursting with schools of fish. He started walking north, so distracted by pedestrians every color of the human spectrum, so happily overwhelmed, that he almost forgot who he was. Face after face swam past, with expressions as interchangeable as a laugh or a scowl or the look that says you’re dripping with money. What was the difference between one or another? He couldn’t see it. And not seeing it, he wondered what others saw in him while he looked at them. It could be anything, maybe even what he felt right then, which was that he was flying. By the time he reached the psychic’s apartment, Alicia was long gone. She became even more pissed after he explained why he had been late.
Carlos preferred to remember how she looked at him the times they had visited this zoo. He would lead her down a path, one hand on her hip, the other pointing to the different animals. Like many of his conversations, this one would eventually take them back to Cuba. Much of its wildlife had been hunted out of existence, but there was still a glory of birds, as well as various species of the much-misunderstood bat. Telling her what he knew about each cast an image of himself whose shadow took hours to fade. If Alicia had ever known him, it was in those moments.
A sign announced that the zoo would soon be known as the Central Park Wildlife Center. Despite four years of off-and-on ESL classes, Carlos could only just make out that it meant nothing. Like many immigrants, he had first attempted to learn English by trying to read a newspaper. He would take the Daily News and, with El Diario by his side as a dictionary of sorts, try to make sense of the day’s events. What he had learned, unfortunately, was that languages were not his strength – one reason why, until very early that morning, he had worked in the kitchen of a Cuban restaurant on the Upper East Side. It had potted palms, fans on the ceiling, murals of the Cuban countryside, and food priced for the sort of Americans who reminded him of Canadian tourists in Havana. Plenty of Cubans with money ate there as well; that was where the trouble started.
Last night someone he recognized showed up with a party of twelve: another Marielito, who now pitched for the New York Yankees. They stayed at their table well after the restaurant locked its doors and Carlos finished washing their dishes. He usually left through the kitchen because it was closer to the subway home. On this night he walked through the main room to the lone occupied table. Everyone ignored him until he asked if the ballplayer remembered him. Asked even though Carlos knew him not from Mariel but only as a member of the Cuban national team. The ballplayer shook his head with a smile Carlos could no longer trust himself to interpret. Was he being polite, respectful of a fellow Cuban’s honest mistake? Carlos tried to read those bared teeth like tablets. The longer he stared, the more it felt that the ballplayer was looking straight through him. Like he wasn’t there, which was a lie. Still, when Alicia had asked what made him call the man a fucking liar, finally quieting the table, he knew better than to try to explain.
Alicia wanted a man who was reliable, she had told Carlos earlier that afternoon when he met her outside the salon – not someone who acted crazy and lost his job. He couldn’t say what he felt: she had entered his life too late, and mooring himself to her body hadn’t been enough to keep him from floating off. So she broke up with him. Trying to change her mind would have been pointless. She had grown tired of his apologies and excuses long before this afternoon. He had seen it in her eyes; it was almost a relief to hear it from her mouth. He didn’t belong with her, or anywhere else. Not at the restaurant, or in New York, or even in his own skin. It was why he squirmed sometimes, like he had a racer snake for a spine, something else that drove Alicia crazy. He was starting to lose himself. He knew he had to do something about it.
A small crowd still lingered by the sea lion exhibit. On his way there, Carlos stopped to observe a polar bear backstroke across the length of his pool. Two junior-high boys also watched, close behind the iron bars that separated them from the bear. One of them reached into his jacket and pulled out a rubber fish. He waved it at the bear, who swam over, shook the water from his snow white coat, and approached them. The boy with the fish continued to wave it invitingly. When the bear realized he had been tricked, the boys burst out laughing. Carlos watched the bear to see what he would do: charge them or, more likely, roar in protest. Instead, the bear chose silence. The boys waved the fish some more; the bear just stared. Once the point had been made that his pride was beyond their reach, he lumbered off. The boys turned away and almost bumped into Carlos. Thalarctos maritimus, he said to them in Cuban-accented Latin. They looked at him like he was crazy before heading off for the sea lions. Carlos watched them go, then looked back to the polar bear.
He still remembered the Latin names for most of the animals in the zoo, from when he had taught high school biology. Teaching didn’t pay much, but it had given him a place in Havana. People knew who he was. He visited his parents every month, bringing a tin of sardines to the house where he grew up, within sight of the refinery’s chimneys. On Sundays he’d fish for mackerel off the Malecon with his friends. He lived in an apartment building whose fluted columns and peeling pastel blue paint reminded him of the frescoes on the walls of the Institute’s library. His girlfriend was as crazy about the privacy it afforded them as she was about him. The wife of the block representative called him ‘the professor.’
That was different, of course. Carlos knew she was mocking his youth rather than respecting his learning. Keeping him in his place, lest he get a big head about giving her black shoe polish each month. He remembered the first time that she stopped by for some polish. Her sister and brother-in-law were arriving from Miami via Mexico City that evening, and she wanted to get rid of the gray in her hair for the occasion. Carlos gave her what was left in his tin; in return she invited him to join them for dinner.
Normally Carlos would have passed, but he knew that the woman would be pulling out all the stops to impress her sister. He was right. It had been weeks since he had tasted chicken leg; the dark meat sweated garlic. She had scrounged fresh black beans and rice, as well as a pint bottle of rum. Carlos didn’t even want to guess at what she had bartered for the rum. The couple were impressed enough that – in typical bourgeois fashion, as the block representative pointed out later – they felt compelled to talk about what was readily available in the supermarkets of Miami.
Carlos had already appraised the couple’s appearance. The woman dyed her hair blond, clearly with something better than peroxide. Both of them could have been mannequins advertising gold jewelry. They could probably afford most of what the supermarket had to offer, which was apparently everything. To dwell on this in light of Cuba’s perpetual shortages was rude, he thought, and even more than rude, competitive. So he wasn’t surprised when the block representative retorted that while shortages were part of life’s daily frustrations, coping with them was part of life’s rewards.
The couple from Miami didn’t know what he was talking about. Carlos did. Although he had never said it out loud, he believed that Fidel’s most impressive accomplishment was turning Cuba’s negatives into positives. It wasn’t quite on a par with changing water into wine, but it was close. Where else would people ignore the collapse of their one-crop economy and take pride in who they were as a nation, because their army was fighting imperialism in Angola, and the rest of them had given the finger to the United States for twenty years?
The dinner talk would have sailed into the rocks right then, had the visitors not chosen to steer the conversation toward the calm depths of blood. The night ended with the sisters hugging tearily, the blond one slipping off her gold Rolex watch and strapping it onto her sister’s wrist. Protestations followed, but the Rolex stayed in Havana after the visitors returned to Miami. Which, Carlos knew, was what Fidel wanted. Why else let his enemies back into the country which they had abandoned? If Fidel couldn’t make money selling sugar, then he would do so selling family ties.
Carlos had daydreamed as much as the next person about what it would be like to live in America. It was a place of paradox, a land of skinny women with full refrigerators. He could mock the options inside that refrigerator, and lust after them at the same time. All of it led to envy and resentment. The relatives had carved themselves a slice of the American pie, then sprinkled some of its crumbs on Cuba. The Rolex was a crumb, because its owner had let it go without a thought. All of the money left behind tasted like crumbs. Little by little, the abstractions on which Carlos’ countrymen had sustained themselves lost their taste altogether. Some of them left, the aggressive ones hijacking boats to Florida, the desperate using the ingenuity that made hair dye out of shoe polish to make rafts out of raincoats.
Like most rational people, Carlos had never seriously considered drifting past the sharks that patrolled those waters. Yes, his life had its share of compromises as well. Sugar, coffee, beef, tobacco, rum – everything outsiders associated with Cuba – was available only to those outsiders. And while he didn’t have to share his little apartment with anyone, it was located just past Havana’s westernmost suburbs, meaning he stood in a long line to hitch a ride into the city on the days the bus service broke down. Which was most days.
That spring, a few weeks after the wife of the block representative sold her Rolex to the mistress of a Soviet diplomat, a bus driver stole a working bus and drove five friends through the gates of the Peruvian embassy. The Cuban sentries outside opened fire, wounding two of the passengers and killing one of their own in the crossfire. When the Peruvian government refused to hand over the gate crashers, Fidel called the Peruvians’ bet and raised it. He removed the guards from the embassy, then issued a statement saying that anyone who wanted could enter the embassy and then leave the country. That had been Good Friday, Carlos remembered. By Easter Sunday, more than 10,000 people had jammed onto the grounds.
On Monday morning, just as Carlos was shaving for work, he heard a knock on his door. It was the block representative. A spontaneous demonstration was scheduled to take place at the Peruvian embassy in less than an hour. Carlos arrived outside the embassy gates by the time the sun started to cook. So did one hundred thousand other patriots, hurling a biblical rain of stones and the occasional expensive egg at those inside the gates. They called them scum, worms, traitors. They were playing into the hands of the U.S. by embarrassing Fidel in the eyes of the world. They were making history without authorization. It had to be rewritten, immediately, forcibly, for all the world to see.
While Carlos never worked himself up as much as some, he always did the patriotic thing. Just as he valued his everyday role as a teacher in revolutionary Havana, so he accepted the occasional cameo as a demonstrator for revolutionary values. Either way, he was playing a part in a play staged by Fidel, along with everyone else he knew. Carlos stared hard at the faces pressed against the bars surrounding the embassy by the ten thousand behind them, the faces of those who had abandoned the Revolution. Their smell already carried across the street. Angry at the abuse being heaped on them, they threw back some of their own. Even more than angry, he could tell, they were scared. But this wasn’t why he felt less of the righteousness, less of the certainty, that he had at other demonstrations. Those were all rallies against enemy ideologies, distant outrages. This was the first time that he had seen the face of the enemy.
For some of those standing next to him, the nearness made them froth at the mouth. To Carlos’ surprise, his own saliva had dried in his throat. The people behind the fence ate the same food he did, became exasperated by the same things. He understood why they had turned their backs on Fidel. It was a matter of tolerance; they had reached their limit. A joke had made the rounds a couple of months before: nobody said being a hero of the Revolution was easy. But if it wasn’t, then how harshly could one condemn those who fell by the wayside? Carlos had been one of five million who once heard Fidel speak. He no longer remembered the specifics of that particular event, yet had never forgotten the posters that appeared the next day of five million fists raised in solidarity. And still, with the start of each patriotic chant that Carlos knew he had no choice except to join, the more he felt like an actor who no longer believed in his script.
A stone hit a defector hard on the side of the head. The man lost his legs, but the bodies of those crushed against the fence held him up. He was older and thinner than Carlos, his skin a lined caramel brown. Rather than shout out in pain, or anger, or even simple frustration, he stared straight at Carlos. At first, Carlos couldn’t understand why the man held back. He watched the blood trickle down from one ear. As the man continued to stare, Carlos started to understand his silence. There was nothing to say to people who didn’t listen. Behind those bars, with barely anything to eat and nowhere to shit or piss, for as long as the Peruvians didn’t change their minds, he was free. Free to shout back what he wanted, or not. His tormentors weren’t. Having a choice, and making it, made him proud. It was a lure as shining as any Carlos had ever cast. He felt the irresistible tug of history on his heart. Blood rushed to his head. Breaking ranks with the Revolution, he ran across the empty street. A rock hit him on the shoulder, but he never felt it. He climbed up the hands of those behind the bars, and into the arms of his future.
A security guard materialized before him to say that the zoo was closing. Carlos looked away from the polar bear and nodded to the guard. He joined the last group circling the sea lion pool. It was surrounded by a lush perennial garden, with benches tucked into its corners. No one saw him duck behind a hedge pruned in the shape of a wave.
The grounds grew quiet, then dark. Carlos had a lot of time to think about why he had scaled that fence. He spent two weeks squeezed like a sundried sardine in the embassy grounds, as people went mad with hunger and fear and uncertainty. Then Fidel called the bluff of American propaganda and opened the port of Mariel to any Cuban who wanted to leave. The Miami boatlift began. By May, thousands of vessels crowded the harbor; Cuban immigration made them wait weeks before they could leave. Carlos didn’t board a boat bound for Florida until June.
Looking back at the propeller’s wake, he saw Mariel slowly disappear into what was now his past, along with his girlfriend, his fishing buddies, the parents who bore him on the eve of the Revolution. A wave of shame washed over him as he remembered that the day he threw his old life away, he never thought of saying goodbye. Now there was no going back. For the first time, he felt the loneliness that comes with setting a course for oneself.
Carlos shook it off and looked ahead to what he imagined: an entire city holding out their hands to him across the water. A welcoming committee cheered when they landed, then everyone on his boat was loaded onto a bus bound for the Tamiami Park Fairgrounds for processing. Carlos learned that Cuban Immigration had assigned to each boatload of emigrants a certain number of men and women who had been in prison or in mental hospitals. It was Fidel’s final ploy to embarrass the Americans, to paint all who abandoned the Revolution as lowlifes. About half of the Marielitos were detained at military forts across the country, some for over a year. Carlos spent four months in Kansas, because he never carried his wallet when taking part in a demonstration.
What kept him from despairing there was what had sustained him in Mariel: believing that he would get his chance at the brass ring Cubans seemed so adept at snagging in the United States. Finally they put him on a bus bound for New York. It was colder than he had expected; so was the response of the locals to the arrival of another Marielito. The Americans thought every one of them was a criminal or a psychopath. What surprised him was the response of the Cubans who had settled there earlier. They were no different. Carlos came to realize that someone with no money couldn’t be trusted in a country where money was the only identification card. That he had taught biology meant nothing; speaking English poorly branded him as stupid. In the years that followed, something Fidel had said in one of those marathon speeches started to cloud his hopes, stinging his eyes like smoke: class makes an enemy of your brother. There were a few million of his brothers here in this country of a few hundred million. Yet the money they made, and he didn’t, had built a fence he couldn’t climb. All he could do was look through the bars, from the kitchen to the dining room.
Now it was three years later, he was an unemployed dishwasher, and he couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand that it was what everything he had done amounted to, that it was what Alicia and every other woman would see when they looked at him. He couldn’t stand the terrible truth behind the word freedom. In this country, he was free to choose his dream, but he had to pursue it alone. He missed being in the same boat as his fellow man, no matter what they had to do to survive. Instead he felt alone on a raft. Everywhere he looked there was water, separating him from his dreams. After a while he couldn’t help but drink it, and the salt had driven him crazy. Alicia had every reason in the world to leave him.
All Carlos wanted was to be in a place where he could feel both hope and brotherhood. Now, more alone than ever, he finally realized where he could find them. It was too dark to make out the iron bars of the polar bear preserve very clearly, but he could see the hands reaching out to him – ten thousand of them, back home across the water. Behind the five million fists raised blindly in the air. Behind the hands of those kids teasing the bear, kids who had less sense of who they were than the bear ever would. The bear no longer hunted on glaciers as big as Cuba to survive; he hadn’t forgotten who he was. Carlos had. But he knew how to remember. He began to walk faster. When the security guard spotted him and ordered him to stop, he broke into a run. This fence was eight feet high. It was nothing; he had climbed higher. As he leaped and grabbed hold of the spikes at the top, Carlos felt the guard’s grip around one ankle. He kicked back, used the hands of one of the ten thousand as a springboard, and fell into the arms of those without rights, those with only one thought: escape.
Homo sapiens, he said to the bear, and joined his brothers.
Dishwashing had paid the rent on his one-room sublet in the Bronx, even if it didn’t leave much for anything else. It had also brought him one huge meal every night he worked, which wasn’t part of the deal – just an arrangement with the fry cook. He didn’t mind that the temperature of the water left his hands looking like lobster claws, or how his arms burned from muscle fatigue at the end of each shift. He had worked tougher jobs. The worst had been cleaning the Armory’s toilets, soiled by men too disoriented to flush, let alone acknowledge his service. Not that he would have wanted it acknowledged; he was all too happy to be invisible while he unclogged and scrubbed those holes. Still, there was something demoralizing about being invisible to those who were invisible to others.
He knew better than to explore this feeling with Alicia. It was hard enough to explain how he felt about washing dishes. Lying on his mattress, staring at the darkness overhead, he had told her that what he didn’t like about his job was how boring it was. You just don’t like being a dishwasher, she had replied. Alicia was twenty-seven just like him, a manicurist at a beauty salon on Lexington. Her only goal, she told him straight off, was to be an American. This meant committing to climb a ladder, rung by rung. As long as she was going up, she didn’t want to hear about how far off the top was. The better he came to know her, the more he wondered what she saw in him. If he had to guess, it was probably because, four days before meeting her at a party, he had finally found a place he could afford without a roommate. This was his only real accomplishment since arriving from Mariel two years earlier, and she must have smelled it on him while they talked and kissed on a fire escape.
Although she lived in the Bronx and aspired to Union City, Alicia saw that the route to success passed through Manhattan. It wasn’t enough to work there; she bought her clothes and lottery tickets in its shops. Even her santero was on the Harlem border of the Upper West Side. Carlos had intended to meet her there one Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago. He got off the subway at 79th Street and came up to what felt like a tropical sea bursting with schools of fish. He started walking north, so distracted by pedestrians every color of the human spectrum, so happily overwhelmed, that he almost forgot who he was. Face after face swam past, with expressions as interchangeable as a laugh or a scowl or the look that says you’re dripping with money. What was the difference between one or another? He couldn’t see it. And not seeing it, he wondered what others saw in him while he looked at them. It could be anything, maybe even what he felt right then, which was that he was flying. By the time he reached the psychic’s apartment, Alicia was long gone. She became even more pissed after he explained why he had been late.
Carlos preferred to remember how she looked at him the times they had visited this zoo. He would lead her down a path, one hand on her hip, the other pointing to the different animals. Like many of his conversations, this one would eventually take them back to Cuba. Much of its wildlife had been hunted out of existence, but there was still a glory of birds, as well as various species of the much-misunderstood bat. Telling her what he knew about each cast an image of himself whose shadow took hours to fade. If Alicia had ever known him, it was in those moments.
A sign announced that the zoo would soon be known as the Central Park Wildlife Center. Despite four years of off-and-on ESL classes, Carlos could only just make out that it meant nothing. Like many immigrants, he had first attempted to learn English by trying to read a newspaper. He would take the Daily News and, with El Diario by his side as a dictionary of sorts, try to make sense of the day’s events. What he had learned, unfortunately, was that languages were not his strength – one reason why, until very early that morning, he had worked in the kitchen of a Cuban restaurant on the Upper East Side. It had potted palms, fans on the ceiling, murals of the Cuban countryside, and food priced for the sort of Americans who reminded him of Canadian tourists in Havana. Plenty of Cubans with money ate there as well; that was where the trouble started.
Last night someone he recognized showed up with a party of twelve: another Marielito, who now pitched for the New York Yankees. They stayed at their table well after the restaurant locked its doors and Carlos finished washing their dishes. He usually left through the kitchen because it was closer to the subway home. On this night he walked through the main room to the lone occupied table. Everyone ignored him until he asked if the ballplayer remembered him. Asked even though Carlos knew him not from Mariel but only as a member of the Cuban national team. The ballplayer shook his head with a smile Carlos could no longer trust himself to interpret. Was he being polite, respectful of a fellow Cuban’s honest mistake? Carlos tried to read those bared teeth like tablets. The longer he stared, the more it felt that the ballplayer was looking straight through him. Like he wasn’t there, which was a lie. Still, when Alicia had asked what made him call the man a fucking liar, finally quieting the table, he knew better than to try to explain.
Alicia wanted a man who was reliable, she had told Carlos earlier that afternoon when he met her outside the salon – not someone who acted crazy and lost his job. He couldn’t say what he felt: she had entered his life too late, and mooring himself to her body hadn’t been enough to keep him from floating off. So she broke up with him. Trying to change her mind would have been pointless. She had grown tired of his apologies and excuses long before this afternoon. He had seen it in her eyes; it was almost a relief to hear it from her mouth. He didn’t belong with her, or anywhere else. Not at the restaurant, or in New York, or even in his own skin. It was why he squirmed sometimes, like he had a racer snake for a spine, something else that drove Alicia crazy. He was starting to lose himself. He knew he had to do something about it.
A small crowd still lingered by the sea lion exhibit. On his way there, Carlos stopped to observe a polar bear backstroke across the length of his pool. Two junior-high boys also watched, close behind the iron bars that separated them from the bear. One of them reached into his jacket and pulled out a rubber fish. He waved it at the bear, who swam over, shook the water from his snow white coat, and approached them. The boy with the fish continued to wave it invitingly. When the bear realized he had been tricked, the boys burst out laughing. Carlos watched the bear to see what he would do: charge them or, more likely, roar in protest. Instead, the bear chose silence. The boys waved the fish some more; the bear just stared. Once the point had been made that his pride was beyond their reach, he lumbered off. The boys turned away and almost bumped into Carlos. Thalarctos maritimus, he said to them in Cuban-accented Latin. They looked at him like he was crazy before heading off for the sea lions. Carlos watched them go, then looked back to the polar bear.
He still remembered the Latin names for most of the animals in the zoo, from when he had taught high school biology. Teaching didn’t pay much, but it had given him a place in Havana. People knew who he was. He visited his parents every month, bringing a tin of sardines to the house where he grew up, within sight of the refinery’s chimneys. On Sundays he’d fish for mackerel off the Malecon with his friends. He lived in an apartment building whose fluted columns and peeling pastel blue paint reminded him of the frescoes on the walls of the Institute’s library. His girlfriend was as crazy about the privacy it afforded them as she was about him. The wife of the block representative called him ‘the professor.’
That was different, of course. Carlos knew she was mocking his youth rather than respecting his learning. Keeping him in his place, lest he get a big head about giving her black shoe polish each month. He remembered the first time that she stopped by for some polish. Her sister and brother-in-law were arriving from Miami via Mexico City that evening, and she wanted to get rid of the gray in her hair for the occasion. Carlos gave her what was left in his tin; in return she invited him to join them for dinner.
Normally Carlos would have passed, but he knew that the woman would be pulling out all the stops to impress her sister. He was right. It had been weeks since he had tasted chicken leg; the dark meat sweated garlic. She had scrounged fresh black beans and rice, as well as a pint bottle of rum. Carlos didn’t even want to guess at what she had bartered for the rum. The couple were impressed enough that – in typical bourgeois fashion, as the block representative pointed out later – they felt compelled to talk about what was readily available in the supermarkets of Miami.
Carlos had already appraised the couple’s appearance. The woman dyed her hair blond, clearly with something better than peroxide. Both of them could have been mannequins advertising gold jewelry. They could probably afford most of what the supermarket had to offer, which was apparently everything. To dwell on this in light of Cuba’s perpetual shortages was rude, he thought, and even more than rude, competitive. So he wasn’t surprised when the block representative retorted that while shortages were part of life’s daily frustrations, coping with them was part of life’s rewards.
The couple from Miami didn’t know what he was talking about. Carlos did. Although he had never said it out loud, he believed that Fidel’s most impressive accomplishment was turning Cuba’s negatives into positives. It wasn’t quite on a par with changing water into wine, but it was close. Where else would people ignore the collapse of their one-crop economy and take pride in who they were as a nation, because their army was fighting imperialism in Angola, and the rest of them had given the finger to the United States for twenty years?
The dinner talk would have sailed into the rocks right then, had the visitors not chosen to steer the conversation toward the calm depths of blood. The night ended with the sisters hugging tearily, the blond one slipping off her gold Rolex watch and strapping it onto her sister’s wrist. Protestations followed, but the Rolex stayed in Havana after the visitors returned to Miami. Which, Carlos knew, was what Fidel wanted. Why else let his enemies back into the country which they had abandoned? If Fidel couldn’t make money selling sugar, then he would do so selling family ties.
Carlos had daydreamed as much as the next person about what it would be like to live in America. It was a place of paradox, a land of skinny women with full refrigerators. He could mock the options inside that refrigerator, and lust after them at the same time. All of it led to envy and resentment. The relatives had carved themselves a slice of the American pie, then sprinkled some of its crumbs on Cuba. The Rolex was a crumb, because its owner had let it go without a thought. All of the money left behind tasted like crumbs. Little by little, the abstractions on which Carlos’ countrymen had sustained themselves lost their taste altogether. Some of them left, the aggressive ones hijacking boats to Florida, the desperate using the ingenuity that made hair dye out of shoe polish to make rafts out of raincoats.
Like most rational people, Carlos had never seriously considered drifting past the sharks that patrolled those waters. Yes, his life had its share of compromises as well. Sugar, coffee, beef, tobacco, rum – everything outsiders associated with Cuba – was available only to those outsiders. And while he didn’t have to share his little apartment with anyone, it was located just past Havana’s westernmost suburbs, meaning he stood in a long line to hitch a ride into the city on the days the bus service broke down. Which was most days.
That spring, a few weeks after the wife of the block representative sold her Rolex to the mistress of a Soviet diplomat, a bus driver stole a working bus and drove five friends through the gates of the Peruvian embassy. The Cuban sentries outside opened fire, wounding two of the passengers and killing one of their own in the crossfire. When the Peruvian government refused to hand over the gate crashers, Fidel called the Peruvians’ bet and raised it. He removed the guards from the embassy, then issued a statement saying that anyone who wanted could enter the embassy and then leave the country. That had been Good Friday, Carlos remembered. By Easter Sunday, more than 10,000 people had jammed onto the grounds.
On Monday morning, just as Carlos was shaving for work, he heard a knock on his door. It was the block representative. A spontaneous demonstration was scheduled to take place at the Peruvian embassy in less than an hour. Carlos arrived outside the embassy gates by the time the sun started to cook. So did one hundred thousand other patriots, hurling a biblical rain of stones and the occasional expensive egg at those inside the gates. They called them scum, worms, traitors. They were playing into the hands of the U.S. by embarrassing Fidel in the eyes of the world. They were making history without authorization. It had to be rewritten, immediately, forcibly, for all the world to see.
While Carlos never worked himself up as much as some, he always did the patriotic thing. Just as he valued his everyday role as a teacher in revolutionary Havana, so he accepted the occasional cameo as a demonstrator for revolutionary values. Either way, he was playing a part in a play staged by Fidel, along with everyone else he knew. Carlos stared hard at the faces pressed against the bars surrounding the embassy by the ten thousand behind them, the faces of those who had abandoned the Revolution. Their smell already carried across the street. Angry at the abuse being heaped on them, they threw back some of their own. Even more than angry, he could tell, they were scared. But this wasn’t why he felt less of the righteousness, less of the certainty, that he had at other demonstrations. Those were all rallies against enemy ideologies, distant outrages. This was the first time that he had seen the face of the enemy.
For some of those standing next to him, the nearness made them froth at the mouth. To Carlos’ surprise, his own saliva had dried in his throat. The people behind the fence ate the same food he did, became exasperated by the same things. He understood why they had turned their backs on Fidel. It was a matter of tolerance; they had reached their limit. A joke had made the rounds a couple of months before: nobody said being a hero of the Revolution was easy. But if it wasn’t, then how harshly could one condemn those who fell by the wayside? Carlos had been one of five million who once heard Fidel speak. He no longer remembered the specifics of that particular event, yet had never forgotten the posters that appeared the next day of five million fists raised in solidarity. And still, with the start of each patriotic chant that Carlos knew he had no choice except to join, the more he felt like an actor who no longer believed in his script.
A stone hit a defector hard on the side of the head. The man lost his legs, but the bodies of those crushed against the fence held him up. He was older and thinner than Carlos, his skin a lined caramel brown. Rather than shout out in pain, or anger, or even simple frustration, he stared straight at Carlos. At first, Carlos couldn’t understand why the man held back. He watched the blood trickle down from one ear. As the man continued to stare, Carlos started to understand his silence. There was nothing to say to people who didn’t listen. Behind those bars, with barely anything to eat and nowhere to shit or piss, for as long as the Peruvians didn’t change their minds, he was free. Free to shout back what he wanted, or not. His tormentors weren’t. Having a choice, and making it, made him proud. It was a lure as shining as any Carlos had ever cast. He felt the irresistible tug of history on his heart. Blood rushed to his head. Breaking ranks with the Revolution, he ran across the empty street. A rock hit him on the shoulder, but he never felt it. He climbed up the hands of those behind the bars, and into the arms of his future.
A security guard materialized before him to say that the zoo was closing. Carlos looked away from the polar bear and nodded to the guard. He joined the last group circling the sea lion pool. It was surrounded by a lush perennial garden, with benches tucked into its corners. No one saw him duck behind a hedge pruned in the shape of a wave.
The grounds grew quiet, then dark. Carlos had a lot of time to think about why he had scaled that fence. He spent two weeks squeezed like a sundried sardine in the embassy grounds, as people went mad with hunger and fear and uncertainty. Then Fidel called the bluff of American propaganda and opened the port of Mariel to any Cuban who wanted to leave. The Miami boatlift began. By May, thousands of vessels crowded the harbor; Cuban immigration made them wait weeks before they could leave. Carlos didn’t board a boat bound for Florida until June.
Looking back at the propeller’s wake, he saw Mariel slowly disappear into what was now his past, along with his girlfriend, his fishing buddies, the parents who bore him on the eve of the Revolution. A wave of shame washed over him as he remembered that the day he threw his old life away, he never thought of saying goodbye. Now there was no going back. For the first time, he felt the loneliness that comes with setting a course for oneself.
Carlos shook it off and looked ahead to what he imagined: an entire city holding out their hands to him across the water. A welcoming committee cheered when they landed, then everyone on his boat was loaded onto a bus bound for the Tamiami Park Fairgrounds for processing. Carlos learned that Cuban Immigration had assigned to each boatload of emigrants a certain number of men and women who had been in prison or in mental hospitals. It was Fidel’s final ploy to embarrass the Americans, to paint all who abandoned the Revolution as lowlifes. About half of the Marielitos were detained at military forts across the country, some for over a year. Carlos spent four months in Kansas, because he never carried his wallet when taking part in a demonstration.
What kept him from despairing there was what had sustained him in Mariel: believing that he would get his chance at the brass ring Cubans seemed so adept at snagging in the United States. Finally they put him on a bus bound for New York. It was colder than he had expected; so was the response of the locals to the arrival of another Marielito. The Americans thought every one of them was a criminal or a psychopath. What surprised him was the response of the Cubans who had settled there earlier. They were no different. Carlos came to realize that someone with no money couldn’t be trusted in a country where money was the only identification card. That he had taught biology meant nothing; speaking English poorly branded him as stupid. In the years that followed, something Fidel had said in one of those marathon speeches started to cloud his hopes, stinging his eyes like smoke: class makes an enemy of your brother. There were a few million of his brothers here in this country of a few hundred million. Yet the money they made, and he didn’t, had built a fence he couldn’t climb. All he could do was look through the bars, from the kitchen to the dining room.
Now it was three years later, he was an unemployed dishwasher, and he couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand that it was what everything he had done amounted to, that it was what Alicia and every other woman would see when they looked at him. He couldn’t stand the terrible truth behind the word freedom. In this country, he was free to choose his dream, but he had to pursue it alone. He missed being in the same boat as his fellow man, no matter what they had to do to survive. Instead he felt alone on a raft. Everywhere he looked there was water, separating him from his dreams. After a while he couldn’t help but drink it, and the salt had driven him crazy. Alicia had every reason in the world to leave him.
All Carlos wanted was to be in a place where he could feel both hope and brotherhood. Now, more alone than ever, he finally realized where he could find them. It was too dark to make out the iron bars of the polar bear preserve very clearly, but he could see the hands reaching out to him – ten thousand of them, back home across the water. Behind the five million fists raised blindly in the air. Behind the hands of those kids teasing the bear, kids who had less sense of who they were than the bear ever would. The bear no longer hunted on glaciers as big as Cuba to survive; he hadn’t forgotten who he was. Carlos had. But he knew how to remember. He began to walk faster. When the security guard spotted him and ordered him to stop, he broke into a run. This fence was eight feet high. It was nothing; he had climbed higher. As he leaped and grabbed hold of the spikes at the top, Carlos felt the guard’s grip around one ankle. He kicked back, used the hands of one of the ten thousand as a springboard, and fell into the arms of those without rights, those with only one thought: escape.
Homo sapiens, he said to the bear, and joined his brothers.
Jorge Saralegui was born in Cuba and reached the United States as a refugee at the age of seven. He graduated from Antioch College with a degree in creative writing. His stories have appeared in Zyzzyva, The Santa Monica Review, and Porcupine, and a fourth in an anthology called Latinos in Lotusland. Jorge now lives in Los Angeles, and works on a novel.
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