Tropic of Cuba

1939. At a table in Havana's Floridita bar, I sat with Hemingway. His companion was a mannishly dressed blonde with a magazine figure and a neoclassic but hard face. She would have looked just right astride a jumper.

Hemingway resembled an altered, jowly tomcat with mouse clenched between teeth. From the massive, swarthy guy came a small, high-pitched peacock's voice. We exchanged amenities while instinctively not taking to each other.

A little beggar girl, leading her blind grandfather, came in to sell white roses. When she approached Hemingway, he shrugged and said, "Tiny daughter, I have not money for bread."

Tears of pity came into her eyes. She pinned her best flower on his lapel and said, "I give you this Madonna rose as a gift. You'll see; it will bring you good luck!"

Hemingway put a large bill in (continued on page 190)Tropic of Cuba(continued from page 149) her hand and then kissed her.

The waiter, who brought us platters of miniature ocean-salt oysters, addressed Hemingway as "Don Ernesto."

Hoppy, the grinning, opium-doped Chinaman, sold Hemingway paper cones filled with peanuts. Hemingway and Hoppy were old friends. They rattled away laughingly in a code that escaped me. It struck me that Hemingway was inordinately fond of his inferiors.

With my background of paisano blasphemy and years as a construction worker, profanity had always been at home, like good bread, in my mouth. But Hemingway's scatological language was repellent to me and exceeded any verbal obscenity I was capable of.

He bored me with talk of big game, fishing, boxing and bulls. In my turn, I expanded upon the fine art of girl hunting and the incomparable joys of all lovemaking positions.

Hemingway was annoyed and said my skull was crammed with vaginas. I told him that if he thought it was all in my head, he should come along with me to a whorehouse and find out which of us was the better man.

I saw Hemingway a few more times. He was staying at the Ambos Mundos, a hotel for Cubans. The sign of the Ambos Mundos was two globes of the world. It was traditional to gamble for the drinks at the Ambos Mundos bar. We threw four dice from a leather cup with the barkeep for double or nothing. The dice always came out right for Hemingway. I couldn't keep up with the hairy, big guy in drinking. I'm a menace when I've had too much. After a flock of drinks, I got drunk and critical. Anyway, Hemingway liked to egg a guy on.

* * *

My Havana pal and generous selfappointed host was Vito, the melonheaded Neapolitan New Yorker who was the produce monopolist of Cuba. Like the Cuban wags, he called the vagina fruta bomba. He would lecture me against the bounds of matrimony.

"I manured myself with three wives. No more wives! Pete, the dollar buys all the fruta bomba you want. If you get married, I don't want to know you!"

I was in his office overlooking the malecón, the mall. He was on the phone, ordering a shipload of tomatoes and pineapples to be dumped at sea because the A&P company would not pay the price he demanded.

Business over, he said, "Time for sport. You're coming to my favorite whorehouse. I phoned Prudencia, the madre superiora. She read your book in Spanish."

With Vito's Rolls-Royce, we picked up Luis, the society doctor, Juan, the world's sugar king, and the Harvard-educated playboy, Esteban.

Prudencia's residencia de reunión was a palace. A liveried servant showed us into the salon, which was splendid with rare paintings and coats of mail.

Madama Prudencia was an illustrious lady with a fine figure and the chaste mien of a youthful abbess. When I kissed her hand, she said graciously, "Welcome to the dulce vida de Cuba."

The five girls Madama had arranged for us arrived.

She whispered proudly, "These girls are pristine, pure and virginal as diamonds. This is their first assignment in my establishment."

The nymphets carried schoolbooks. I remember their names: Juanilla, Belita, Magdalena, Chuchita and María de Jesús. They were from upper-class families.

We were served a gourmet lunch and wines. I chose María de Jesús. She was small and thin, a sexy wisp with a ratfaced attraction. María said she was 16. She looked 12. Esteban told bawdy stories. The girls giggled and shrieked. In the grandiose salon, Madama showed pornographic color films accompanied by a Brahms recording. We danced with our girls and fondled them. Madama escorted each pair of us to a dreamlike bedroom. I felt her hips and whispered that I preferred her to the kid. She invited me to return later and spend the night with her.Madama told me to do anything and everything except actual entry with María de Jesús.

The vaginal halo is peculiar to Latins, sacrosanct virginity being a physiological dowry, the husband's inalienable right to consummate his betroth's mysterious hymen. Consequently, the virginal Latin girl must imaginatively resort to lingual, digital and anal delights.

Dallying with the naked nymphet brought me twinges of conscience. I could visualize her at the altar in the symbolic white of purity, dropping her eyes modestly as her husband slipped the wedding ring onto her finger. Her experiences at Madama Prudencia's would be discreetly forgotten, or perhaps vividly recalled. But other little girls would come to the residencia de reunión to accommodate rich men. It is not what is done. It is how it is done.

That night I was in bed with Madama Prudencia. We also talked. She and her brother Ramón fought on the side of the Loyalists. Her other brother, Rodrigo, was an ardent Franco officer. Her parents' hearts were torn. Ramón was captured by Franco soldiers. Rodrigo watched the execution of his brother and of the poet Lorca. The sight drove him out of his mind. He hanged himself.

When Franco came into absolute power with the aid of the Fascist and Nazi armies, Prudencia gathered her wealth and fled to Cuba. She said, "You can see for yourself that the great United States is represented here by greedy businessmen, gangsters and perverts. America should offer Cuba statehood. But she is too blind to do it. The heaven of the rich will end in Cuba. There will be revolution and civil war, followed by a Communist society."

"What will happen to your establishment?"

"Nature will prevail. Aging men, whether capitalist or Communist, want little girls for sex."

I pleased her. She said with dignity, "Marry me. I will share my fortune with you. I will provide you with all the girls you desire." I often felt I made a mistake by not accepting her proposition. I could have avoided many hells. But the only thing constant about me is my God-given compulsive promiscuity.

Each morning when I awoke and the sea air and sun greeted me at my Nacional Hotel tenth-floor window, I looked forward to the adventure of another girl. There was, is and never will be anything better in the world than a swift passion with a darling new girl.

* * *

The magnet of Havana's night life was the Nacional gambling casino. Natasha, the Broadway singing star of the floorshow, was my current. One night, sugar-king Juan took a shine to Helene, a doll in the chorus. He had the waiter bring her to our table. Juan said he wanted her to go to bed with him. She refused. He placed ten one-thousand-dollar bills before her. She looked hungrily at the money, but still turned him down. I thought she was a foolish girl, and later tried to make her. She said the reason she had to reject Juan's fabulous deal was that she was painfully ill with a bad dose of gonorrhea given to her by a jerk Cuban musician in the band.

Pleasure had become routine. At night it was the Nacional casino and my girl, Natasha, on stage, reaching out her arms to me and throatily singing Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. We would leave at three A.M. with a group of the rich and world-famous for the carnival park, Los Fritos, watch the drugged voodoo dancers, stop in at the waterfront fish-fry dives on the malecón and banter with the wise white and black whores, or go to peep shows and view the professional orgies of Lesbian and fag circuses, and end up past dawn in the lobby of the Nacional Hotel drinking chilled Tropicale beer. Then upstairs to bed with Natasha and not arising until the afternoon.

Natasha was getting bourgeois. She annoyed me about having to find positive direction in life, ethics, fidelity, true love; she spoke about divorcing her husband and gave me that stuff about "Marry me or lose me."

I discussed this danger with Vito and Juan. Juan owned most of Camagaey. He wanted me to go to his vast estate and write a historical novel glorifying his Spanish ancestors who had settled there after Columbus' voyages, their massacre of the natives, slave traffic and the founding of the family sugar empire.

"When I get there," he said, "I'll take you 'Red hunting.' Any bastard peon that complains about conditions--we make them run, give them a start; then we track them, flush them and shoot them down like dirty dogs. No, sir; we don't stand for any Communist shit!"

When I was alone with Vito, he said haughtily, "Me and you; we're Americans. You ain't gonner be the guest of a goddamn spick. You go to my Isle of Pines plantation, Casa del Río, and take it easy. Buddy, you're getting too much fruta bomba. You'll burn yourself out. You'll have the run of the plantation. I'll have my pilot fly you there."

"I've never been in a plane. I don't want to fly."

"OK, take the boat from Batabanó. My caretaker, Johannes, will meet you at the Nueva Gerona dock on the Isle of Pines."

It took hours for the bumpy, chlorine-smelling train to get to Batabanó. On the way, we passed an insane asylum with nightmarish drawings on its walls.

Batabanó was the port of the sponge and coral fishers. There was a fleet of their gaily painted shallow-draft sailing boats, most of them named after saints.

It was an overnight voyage in a small, tired steamer to the Isle of Pines.

Vito's caretaker, Johannes, a grizzly, jaundiced German, met me at the Nueva Gerona dock. In the Ford station wagon, we drove the ten miles over the red-clay washboard roads to the plantation. On the way, I made resolutions: Isolate myself. Stop sleeping with women. Commune only with pencil, paper and typewriter. Hemingway in a better moment had said, "Pete, you got the writing 'juice.'" I was going to put my juice into writing and not girls. No more wasting.

* * *

Casa del Río was a wonderland of brilliant foliage, tropical trees, fruit and citrus orchards, pastures and the thatchroofed bohios of the peons. My quarters were in the U-shaped Spanish mansion. Johannes unpacked my bags and said, "Mr. Vito gave me instructions that you were to be the boss here and have anything you want. Anything, positively."

I sat at a desk with sheets of paper. I got up, paced and squirmed. I didn't have a cause, an idea. Finally I typed, "I don't want to write or worry or fight for anything. To hell with responsibility. All I want are women and fun. Period."

By late afternoon I had had enough of my own company. An edifying book has no breasts and a typewriter no girl's thighs. I wasn't Onan. Nor could I conjure a woman from my ribs. Myself gnawed me. It was not before or after, but the fleshy moment that counted. I went to Johannes' bohio and told him I'd have dinner with him. He was embarrassed. A master should be a master. I told him that writers were a classless breed who became the same as the people they were with. Vito's liquor cellar was under the bohio. I had Johannes bring up bottles of champagne.

"I can't drink alone," I said. "You've got to drink with me."

"Sir, I do what Mr. Vito's guest says. Absolutely."

He asked me what I wished for dinner. I told him to surprise me. He suggested marinated iguana, jellied black parrots, pheasant, wild rice, fried bananas and coconut ice cream. I agreed. He went to the doorway and shouted, "Liz! Liz, come here, you jungle bitch!"

A tall, svelte, dreamy young Negress appeared. He gave her orders for the dinner. I had never been with a black girl. My desire for her was instantaneous, like a volcano erupting.

Johannes and I sat at the kitchen table. The champagne made him talk about himself.

Thirty years before, he had been an immigrant weaver in a Massachusetts mill. When he came home unexpectedly and found his wife in bed with his best friend, the Lutheran minister, he walked to Boston and boarded the first freighter he saw. The ship's destination was the Isle of Pines. He went to work for Vito and never set foot off the island.

Liz came in with a brace of pheasants. I could not take my eyes from her as she tended the charcoal stove, prepared the birds and moved sensuously about.

"Johannes," I said, "I want sweet Liz to drink and eat with us." He was startled. She looked at him questioningly. I poured her champagne. She did not accept the goblet as I held it out to her.

Johannes barked, "Don't stand there like an ape bitch! Obey the gentleman! Drink with Mr. Vito's honorable guest and drink jolly, by Christ!"

Night fell. After Liz put the strange dinner on the table, I had her sit by my side. Her nearness had me in a spiraling knot. I was drawn to her uppointing breasts, perfect ears, hands, and tight round black knees close to mine. I caressed her knees under the table. I barely touched my dinner. Liz was the food I wanted. My plan was to get us all drunk and then take Liz to my bed. I had Johannes open bottle upon bottle of champagne. Liz stood up and leaned over to clear the table. I could not resist running my hand up under her dress along the hard smooth thighs and firm, curved, polished magical buttocks.

Johannes watched me intently. Suddenly he asked, "Sir, you like Liz?"

"Of course--she's wonderful!"

"Sir, you thinking of sleeping with Liz?"

"Why not--that would be great!"

Through my champagne haze, I saw him peering at me weirdly. He blurted, "Mister! Liz is my wife!"

I struggled to sober up and distinguish our positions.

"Now, goddamnit, Johannes, why didn't you tell me in the beginning that Liz is your wife? I wouldn't touch another man's woman, but I'm no mind reader, goddamnit!"

"I thought a gentleman would be disgusted and insulted if I told him I married a nigger."

"Johannes, we're not in uncivilized, racial America."

"Would the gentleman still care to sleep with my wife?"

I didn't answer. His square head wavered. He read me. He gritted his teeth and sweaty purple veins stood out on his pale forehead.

"Liz," he glowered, "you heard the gentleman's desire?"

She nodded. He bellowed, "On the phone, Mr. Vito gave me instructions that his guest, the gentleman, was to have quickly anything he wanted! What the hell are you waiting for! Go to the big house. Get your black-bitch ass and thing in the tub with hot water and plenty sweet-smelling soap! Put on nice perfume and powder! Then come back with a fancy flimsy, schnell!"

During her absence, the thick gray German and I drank urgently in silence. Liz returned, in a saffron veil of negligee, exotic from bath, perfume and makeup. Johannes grabbed her arm brutally and shoved her toward me. "Go with the gentleman and see you give him the best time!"

Liz' straight features and mouth were childlike and sultry. Her body put to shame her sisters of other races. In Liz, God had designed the most desirable form and colored her deeply dark. With Liz I enjoyed the virtue of unconditional lust. I savored that animal pleasure closest to the truth of nature.

I caught the mad face of Johannes gazing through the window. I snapped out the bed lamp. Liz drawled confidently, "The ole man ain't gonner do nothing. Mr. Vito's the Lord to him. An' you is Mr. Vito's special guest."

Then we heard him stomping around the grounds of the mansion, howling guttural cries interspersed with shotgun blasts. After his drunken yawps ceased, the surrounding jungle became fraught with the screeching of peacocks, twittering of nightingales, chattering of monkeys, satire of parrots, hooting of owls and the confusion of other creatures.

I awoke to find myself alone. The moiling heady spoor of Liz was on the silken sheets. Johannes came to the door to tell me that Liz would draw the bath and serve breakfast at my convenience.

Liz was with me nights while Johannes, outside, made berserk noises and tore up the landscape. In the mornings, everything would be serene, Liz working with the servants and Johannes anxious to cater to me.

* * *

Nueva Gerona was a ramshackle river town with docks, bars, a church, bank, dance hall, gas station, farm-implements agency, telephone building, slaughterhouse, filthy fly-laden restaurant and markets and unpaved streets. Off the thoroughfare were packed rows of thatch- and tin-roofed hovels with walls of dried clay. They were the same: earthen floor, sunless interior, fowl, swine and goats running in and out, an unkempt father in the doorway, and behind, on the wall, the inevitable lithograph of Our Lady of Sorrows. When seeing a stranger roaming by, it was not unusual for the man in the doorway to bring out a ragged, barefoot, hardly teenage girl and offer her to the wanderer for 50 cents or less. On an occasion, I was tempted; the little girl was very pretty, all soulful eyes; but the hopeless sacrificial expression on the child's face shamed me. Or was it because I had been told that tuberculosis, leprosy and other diseases infested the peons?

Near Nueva Gerona, on a plain barricaded by marbled heights and dense forests, was the presidio modelo. Under the glaring sun stood the high lime-coated circular model prison. The commandant, a stout Batista army officer with sideburns and mustachio, was happy to show me the place. He took me inside to the center of the drum-shaped structure. From that hub, no movement could evade notice. Within the dramatic concave there were four tiers of unbroken balconies fronting the barred cells. A word from the commandant and all the doors opened mechanically. Convicts came out of the cells and lined the railings. The majority were Negroid, their blackness contrasting starkly with the whitewash of the prison.

I saw chained convicts working the marble quarry, in the forest felling ebony, mahogany and guayacan trees; others making floor and roof tiles, and a number making cordage from the bark of the majagua tree. There seemed to be as many armed soldier-guards and dangerous dogs as there were prisoners.

"Most of these men were convicted of political crimes against the government," said the commandant. "They subscribe to foreign radical doctrines and therefore must be treated as vermin. Whoever escapes is hunted down and shot dead on sight. Also those who give them refuge--even a glass of water. No one has fled the presidio and lived."

The prisoners appeared to be nothing but simple peasants.

At a quay in Nueva Gerona was a sponge-fishing boat, the Santa Isidora. Next to it, a luxury cruiser, the Sturgeon. On the Sturgeon's deck was a slim blonde sunning herself. The sponge fishers had brought a pig from the slaughterhouse. They cut it apart, salted the pieces away in buckets and gave the heart, liver, intestines and brains to a covetous policeman, who wrapped them in burlap and left with elation.

The racy girl on the Sturgeon and I smiled at each other. She beckoned me to come aboard. Her name was Alice. She made martinis of vodka and sake. Alice was from Cleveland. She was on her honeymoon. Her husband had been called away to negotiate a defense contract. The Second World War was in the air. He was making a lot of money. The Sturgeon belonged to her father, Dr. Farber. Alice said casually, "Dad is protecting me from sin until my husband returns. Mother Mary, I'm bored."

Without ado, we discussed sex.

"There's one way to get around Dad so that we can be together. He's nutty about Hitler. Play along with him."

Dr. Farber came aboard with packets of mail. He was fair, with rosy cheeks, a Charlie Chaplin mustache and glassy blue eyes. He was not about to let me get next to his daughter.

After a few perfunctory visits, I confided to Dr. Farber that I hated the Reds and loved Hitler. His eyes glowed. He expounded Nazi ideology for hours.

I echoed everything he said. He trembled with joy.

"Your heart is in the right place," he said. "You are highly intelligent--fine, fine. I trust you!"

He took me to his cabin, showed me his two-way short-wave set and tuned in Berlin. On the wall was a painting of Hitler, daggers and a swastika flag. He asked me breathlessly, "Would you raise your arm and heil the Führer with me?"

I joined him in heiling. After that, he asked me to do him the favor of keeping his lonely daughter company and to help him safeguard her virtue. When he left on an overnight hush-hush mission to a fellow Nazi's plantation, Alice and I spent the night and the following day on the bed in ravenous erotica beneath the portrait of Hitler. With Dr. Farber's blessings, Alice was my guest at Vito's Casa del Río for days.

I had only two other girls during my Isle of Pines holiday: short, husky, freckled Pamela, daughter of a Canadian clergyman who was obsessed with locating pirate treasure in the sea; and a Chinese girl, lissome, almond Cricket, whose father had a crude bar for peons off of Casa del Río in a jungle clearing where once flourished a village that was leveled by the 1926 hurricane.

I used to drive to the jungle bar and shoot pool and drink beer with the peons. The Chinaman never said a word to me. One night, after the peons left and her father retired, Cricket and I made love atop the pool table. She tasted like cloying litchi nuts.

* * *

On February second, Nueva Gerona celebrated the candelaria, the purification of the Virgin Mary. The main street was thronged. Peons came by foot, burro, oxcarts and trucks belonging to the plantation owners from McKinley, Los Indios, Punto de los Barcos, Santa Fe, Santa Barbara and San Pedro. German, English and Cuban plantation owners came either on horseback or in large expensive autos covered with the dust of the red-clay roads. There was no consciousness of skin color. Commingled were Spaniards, Indians, whites and blacks, with their children ranging from sepia to high yellow. What did stand out sharply was the distinction between rich and poor, master and vassal. For every 50 macheteros (peons toting cane knives on their sides) there was a stern-faced capataz--boss man, a veritable conquistador--wearing panama, embroidered shirt, white-linen jacket, cartridge belt and pistol.

Vendors sold fried chicken, fish, snails, rice, sausages, hot peppers and black beans. The delicacy of the peons was roast pork. Bristled greasy fat, meat and bones, blanketed with enormous green flies, were cut with a machete for sandwiches. The affluent drank Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola. Others wetted their mouths with rum, beer or fruit juices. The children sucked raw sugar cane.

Plantation owners and overseers sat in the cool of arcades gambling at cards. Peons grouped humbly about, amazed at the sight of mounds of pesetas. For those who wore shoes or boots, there was the status ritual of having their footwear shined--even though minutes later they were again caked with road dust. Within the one stifling dance hall, youths did the zapateado--the clog dance--and their sinuous samba and rumba.

The air was felicitously burdened with oven-hot sunshine, oily foods, tobacco, vaporous red dust, rum, colas and perspiration. Under the thatched dome of an open-timbered structure were held the cockfights. The raised benches around the arena were jammed. The arrogantly beautiful burnished, razorspurred bantams strutted warily in deathly ballet and then lightninglike flew into each other, pecking, gouging, slashing and scattering their blood and feathers. The bettors cried encouragement with pleas and curses to their cocks. The cockmasters implored their champions to blind and kill the adversary, spoke to them in poetically endearing terms, picked them up lovingly, licked the blood from them, massaged them, kissed them and blew stimulating air up their behinds.

Night saw the procession of the candelaria. Behind the vestmented priest, soldiers, police and the gaudy effigy of the Virgin Mary, the mass carried candles.

Outside a hovel at the end of town, a cow was dying. Someone said the cow had anthrax. The cow was desperately trying to raise its head into the moonlight. The owner and his wife were wringing their hands. The priest and procession formed about the stricken animal, knelt and prayed for its comfort. Realizing that the cow was in its last throes, many set up lamentations, keening as to its life-sustaining value and the catastrophic loss to the penniless family. A policeman wept also.

Following the sanctifying of the candles and the observances paid to the Virgin Mary, the mayor lauded the government and requested all to bow their heads and pray thanksgiving to General Batista. Blessings by the priest and an indifferent fireworks display concluded the festivities for the purification of the Virgin Mary.

The crowds were about to depart. In the distance sounded the ominous steam whistle of the presidio. It blew incessantly. There had been an escape. The soldiers and police drew their guns with much fanfare and ordered the people to remain. There was fright on the faces of the peons. The plantation dons moved about with authority and organized their own posse.

Armored vehicles sped into town with bells clanging and sirens wailing. Following them were pickup trucks bringing bloodhounds. The peons were rounded up, told to throw their machetes into a heap and submit to the scrutiny of presidio officials and guards. Four political prisoners had escaped.

The commandant asked me to use Vito's station wagon to transport soldiers for the hunt. He told me, "The bastards took advantage of the candelaria to escape. They've been gone for hours. I hope we don't find them too quickly--it will spoil the excitement of the chase."

As I went for the station wagon, I saw the priest speaking gravely to the commandant. The commandant shook his head emphatically. The priest looked sad and choking. I guessed that the priest was begging mercy for the prisoners or did not wish the prisoners, when caught, to meet death without Christian spiritual preparation.

The many hunters fanned out toward Santa Barbara, Santa Fe and the center of the island reaching to the low mountains of La Cañada. Reluctantly, I drove overfed soldiers with the central contingent heading for the range of La Cañada. Between the stops and searches at plantations, the soldiers carried on as if on carnival outing, smoking big cigars and drinking wildly. The terrorized peons were offensively interrogated and manhandled.

At dawn the bloodhounds scented out the prisoners in a haystack of a tenant farm on a slope of La Cañada. I wish I had not been there. I had been praying for the prisoners not to be found. The prisoners, young peons, one white and three black, were herded at gunpoint into the open field, riddled with hundreds of bullets, spat upon, urinated upon and their bodies hacked to bits with machetes.

The peon tenant farmer was accused of harboring the fugitives. He screamed that he did not even know the prisoners had hidden in his haystack. The soldiers threw him upon the butchered corpses and shot him to death. His wife and daughters were dragged out of the farmhouse and raped by the soldiers. Back in Nueva Gerona, the drink-maddened soldiers went on a rampage.

As I packed my bags at Casa del Río, Liz looked softly at me and said that she was pregnant. Would I think of her once in a while? I would. And dearly.

Johannes drove me to Nueva Gerona. I thanked him for the good care he had taken of me.

"The best is none too good for Mr. Vito's guest," he answered.

On poles and buildings, the police were tacking up posters with the death sign of skull and crossbones, warning of a new rabies outbreak.

I boarded the steamer for Batabanó. My soul welled with murder. I saw myself with a machine gun filled with never-ending bullets shooting down Vito, the rich Cubans, Batista and his soldiers and police and, like a Jesus, miraculously bringing back to life the four prisoners and the tenant farmer.

In Havana, I sat with Hemingway again at the Ambos Mundos bar. The place was deserted. We were alone. We drank. But that time drinking could not make me drunk. I told him about the escaped prisoners, the tenant farmer and how I felt. I said, "In the name of Christ, how can you bear to live in Cuba and not write and protest about the goddamn things that take place here?"

Hemingway answered, "I can't count the people I've seen killed for an ideal. Kid, you've never been in a war. You get used to such things. It happens from generation, to generation, like another spring, another harvest. Man is a mothering son of a bitch. The world could be a paradise, but the people hate God and themselves. The peons you saw shot yesterday would be on the other end of the rifle tomorrow. When the revolution comes here, then it will be turnabout and some other unfortunate slob's day in the barrel. You are green. You let sex, religion and social conditions overwhelm you. You're not a bad kid. You'll see it my way someday. We're all born to die. What's the difference if it comes sooner or later? All man's troubles come from his two heads. Perhaps the noblest thing a man can do is to cut off his lower head and blow his goddamn brains out. Now this advice will cost you a drink!"

I did not bother to look up my other playmates in Havana. With revulsion and impatience to get away from that land, I overcame my fear of flying and got on a plane for Miami. Aside from the memory of wondrous Liz, the sensual fruits of the tropic of Cuba had turned to acrid blood in my mouth.