Assignment in Havana

There was a fish in the air, beautiful and almighty, dancing on its tail, the iron-black sword of its bill slashing the Havana skyline. It was May 1991, a hard spring for the Cubans, who were mortified by the loss of the Soviet Union, it too an exalted vision, disappearing into the deep blue abyss of history, unabsolved.

Elliott Payne had never experienced anything quite like this, deep-sea fishing in sight of a city, so near he could clearly make out the cars and bicyclists and the idlers on shore, people strolling aimlessly along the Malecon toward the crossroads of a revolution. How strange. It was a bit counterintuitive, like hunting elk in the suburbs, he thought, a wildness you could engage on your lunch break from the office, trolling a quarter mile offshore and the depth sounder reading a thousand feet. Aboard the Cerebella, the lucky men in the midst of this spectacular convergence—a captain and two mates, three fishermen, all yanquis—were transfixed by the missile blast of iridescence, watching the glorious fish sweep across the ridge and down the trough of an indigo wave, its bill parrying the lethal air, imaginary hips performing a violent rumba until it toppled with a great splash and vanished into the sea.

In an instant the slack in the line snapped taut and hummed with menace, seemingly electrified, and the rod bent impossibly down. Everybody watched Dr. William Isaacs—pear-shaped Doc Billy, the angler, who had chosen to fight the marlin standing up—yanked seaward, his doughy knees slamming the gunnel of the stern, and only the quick hands of a mate saved the neurosurgeon from Connecticut from pitching overboard.

Sweet son of a bitch!

Doc Billy, half off the rail, hollering, refusing to give up or let go, relied on his companions to lunge forward and pull him back over the transom, and there went his cap into the water, its visor embroidered in gold stitching—41st Ernest Hemingway International Classic Billfish Tournament. His head popped up bare and bald like an obscene pink egg, and he huffed and grunted and strained with a degree of exertion you would have thought was well beyond his capacity. The engine rumbled, and the captain backed down on the fish. Up there with him on the bridge, Elliott Payne observed the action, as writers do. In his notebook, under the last sentence he had scribbled—Much Hemingway spoken here—he jotted his best guess: 300 lbs.? Payne was a hybrid of fisherman and hack, a man whose profession it was to catch fish and write about it or, like today and much less preferable, to watch others catch fish and write about that, too. Today Hemingway was on everybody's lips—El Maestro, progenitor of the marlin tournament and honorary god in the overpopulated Cuban pantheon of machismo.

"Doc, tip up," coached the captain. "Let him dive."

This was a kill tournament; there would be no cavalier tag and release. The first mate planted a new ball cap on the doctor's head to protect it from the blazing sun. Sweat poured down his inflated cheeks onto his neck and ringed his collar and the waistband of his shorts as he bowed forward and reeled back, bowed and reeled, mechanical and toylike, his pale legs far apart, bracing himself against the power below. After 20 minutes the fish was off the transom, ready to boat, panting as it lay twisted on its side, one fierce eye condemning the world above. Leaning out, the mate extended the gaff and maneuvered for the right mark, the perfect moment, but it seemed to take forever. Then the marlin spit the hook, threw the line into the startled roundness of Doc's face and was gone. The doctor handed the useless rod to the mate, accepting the loss philosophically.

"A brave fish," he declared in fluent Hemingwayese. He unbuckled the plastic fighting belt strapped around his sizable girth, tossed his ball cap aside and retired into the comfort of the boat's swank, air-conditioned salon, dismissing the crew's efforts to console him. Elliott Payne climbed down from his post on the bridge and followed after the doctor to gather the requisite quotes. Doc had sprawled on the salon's couch, the good sport, reflective, storing away the memory.

"Did I have on my red hat or my green one?" he asked the writer. "I'm a very colorful figure."

By midafternoon Doc had boated a sleek white marlin to haul up to the marina's scale with three more respectable whites and a single but smallish blue landed by his teammates on the other boats, yet even as the deck-hand cranked the last line onto its reel and the captain opened up the engines, everyone knew the best the Americans could hope for here in Cuba was second place, behind the imperious Mexicans, who had radioed everybody to taunt them with the news of their success. It seemed to Elliott Payne, sipping champagne with the fishermen in the cruiser's salon, asking delicate questions about the strategy and skill required to boat a billfish twice your size, that the Cerebella had just begun to plane before the captain throttled down again to approach the channel at the marina's headland, and he was disappointed because he loved this, the roaring slam of the return, coming in from the sea, the sun-cooked feeling of the camaraderie, the mutual gratification of a day spent outdoors that lubricated a stream of stories among shipmates. He loved it as much as the fishing itself, the alternate cycles of boredom and adrenaline, the physical and mental intensity of a fish. Particularly a big fish.

But now, too soon, they were entering the no-wake zone, splitting a flotilla of kayakers headed out, the Cuban Olympic team in training. He wanted to turn the boat around and certainly would have demanded it if he had any inkling whatsoever of what was about to happen onshore.

•

At Marina Hemingway they tied up to the fuel dock, and Elliott Payne stepped ashore through a swarm of journalists from important places, Americans and Europeans and, of course, the Cubans with a TV crew, waiting for permission to come aboard, their eyes rolling with indifference off the sportswriter, nobody they knew or recognized, not competition or at least not worthy competition, neither a proper colleague nor a registered fisherman, a nameless ride-along on the news-breaking Cerebella, the first U.S.-registered vessel to enter Cuban waters legally (except for the Mariel boat lift, which didn't count) and the first to fish for marlin since Hemingway's Pilar 30 years ago, when El Maestro left Cuba for Idaho and the tournament vanished behind a curtain of paranoia and ill will manufactured by uncompromising ideologies. Payne had no use for the correspondents either, although he was keenly aware of the inferiority of his status, his anonymity as a byline and, in most venues, as a person. His job was honorable—not noble, not vital, but not everything had to be—and he knew that. For the past two mornings they had all assembled on the dock in a beggar's queue, pleading to ride along with the good doctor, but as much as Doc liked publicity, he was obsessed and tyrannical about fishing, and the only writer he allowed aboard during the tournament was, however obscure to the public, a fisherman of some reputation like himself. Elliott Payne could feel their meaningless condescension, knew they felt the privilege of fishing with Doc had been wasted on him, a freelancer from an irrelevant trade magazine, but he remained unaffected by his disen-franchisement from their fellowship.

As he walked over to the weigh-in table to check the registry, an attractive young woman in a Cubanacán T-shirt overcame her shyness and handed him a Cuba libre in a plastic cup from the tray she carried—premier Havana Club rum, seven years old, a splash of contraband Coke, one precious ice cube. There sat an official from the tournament at his table, recording individual and (continued on page 120) Havana (continued from page 110) team catches, and behind him, on the arm of what resembled a gallows, the winning fish, a blue marlin—magnificent because it was a blue marlin and not because of its size, which was not immense but modest, its carcass hoisted into the air between two iconic palm trees. A Cubanacán photographer posed dignitaries on each side of the beast to create still more civilizing images to feed the revolution's endless appetite for propaganda. "Permiso," said Elliott Payne, and he leaned over the bookkeeper's shoulder to scan the register, and here was a surprise: The marlin had come from a Cuban boat; a Cuban angler would receive the trophy for Best Individual Fish that evening at the awards ceremony. The homeland had been well defended once again. Payne's eye followed the blue line of the entry across the page to the column that noted weight, and he was confirmed in his estimate of the fish—under 300 pounds, 286. To be honest, nothing to brag about, actually. Doc's marlin would have bettered it by a few dozen pounds, and suddenly the insufficiency of the day wearied his spirit. He felt unsatisfied and irritable. Watching someone else fish was like watching someone else make love, and of course he'd rather watch than not watch, but like anyone but a fool, he'd rather do. On the boat, watching the young mate fumble with the gaff until finally the fish spit the hook, Payne could barely contain himself from yelling, That's not the way you do it, for Christ's sake! He was still bent over the register, making notes, when he heard his name called and looked up, and there was Señor So-and-so, whatever his name was, the deputy from the ministry of information who, two days earlier, had issued Payne his accreditation, a tedious process that had required him to lose half a day sitting in the offices of the Cuban press agency while the bureaucrats tried to determine if he was who he said he was. "I'm nobody worth this much of your time," he had wanted to say, but then he had never understood why bureaucracies and their glacial mechanisms functioned the same under any system, good or bad, large or small.

"Señor Payne, I need you please to come with me, okay?"

"Is something wrong?" Elliott Payne answered absently, studying the man's attire, his chinos and white guayabera, and then staring at the mustache crowning his indulgent smile until suddenly he remembered his deputy's name. Diaz. There was nothing Payne could read as menacing in the lines of the man's expression, but in his dark, unwavering eyes was a grave but nevertheless respectful concern, and he seemed to have lost the ease of authority he had displayed so self-importantly from behind his desk at the ministry. The official took his elbow, lightly—Payne liked it that the Cubans did this, touching you when they talked—and led him back past the fueling dock, the Cerebella still hosting the scrum of reporters, the jaunty neurosurgeon lavished with attention, surrounded by the messengers of the world.

Diaz smiled, nodding once at the boat. "The Jew wins nothing, but still the journalists love him, no?"

Payne was taken off guard by the comment. Was he supposed to answer that? He didn't know if, like so much of the planet, the Cubans had a problem with Jews. Maybe that was the Soviet influence, an annotated contamination after 30 years of influence—Oh, by the way, we despise the Jews too, money-grubbing bankers and all—but the official had said it without apparent malice, casually and with mild amusement, as though he had made a charmingly astute observation.

"He's colorful," said Payne with a trace of sarcasm, tired of the doc's crude allure. "They just want a story."

"Yes, that's true," Diaz said, and Payne was puzzled by the soft lash of irony in his voice. "And you? What about you, Señor Payne? No big fish? No story?"

Elliott Payne began to explain about the article he would write, the focus on the revival of the tournament and its fabled history, the entrepreneurial miracle of Marina Hemingway itself, the glasnost of sportfishing in Cuba, all of these things of equal or greater significance to his editor than the egomaniacal neurosurgeon who had broken the embargo, but he saw that the deputy from the ministry of information was not listening to him. They took a shortcut across the manicured grass in front of a row of condos, Diaz releasing his elbow as they stepped onto the walkway that would take them through the posh complex to the parking lot. Again Payne asked if anything was wrong. And what could it be, anyway? Yes, he had flown in from Mérida without the proper documentation, but the Cubans had fawned over him the minute he stepped off the plane, not stamping his passport even though he had wanted a souvenir, waving him through customs, putting him into a taxi that took him straight to La Prensa, where this very man had fixed the paperwork and then sent him off to Cubanacan, the newly formed and stupendously powerful tourist agency where, without Payne even asking, they had provided him with a car and driver and a ration book for securing gasoline. We love love love Americans. Americans are welcome here! He didn't know Cuba, didn't know much about Cuba, had never been there before, and so he was wary. He knew not to talk to dissidents on the streets—on more than one level that was not a particularly legitimate way to spend his time in Cuba—but he sure as hell had legitimacy here at the marina, with the boats, among the fishermen. He had bought a box of Cohibas on the black market from a starving old man, but did anybody really care about a transgression as expected and predictable as that? Was he in trouble for cigars? In the parking lot was a black late-model Mercedes sedan, the driver holding the door open for them and, incredibly, an escort of armed soldiers in an open jeep, squinting now at Elliott Payne's hesitation, watching him decide what to do as he stopped and set his feet.

"Hold on," he said, alarmed, his voice bolting out of his throat. He felt a chill burst of sweat under his arms and across the back of his neck. "Am I in trouble?"

"Not at all, Señor Payne," Diaz said, but the dry exactness of his courtesy was not reassuring.

"Am I being deported?"

"Of course not, Mr. Payne. You are our guest, but please, you must come in the car with me. Please. You know the godfather, yes? Everyone knows the godfather. I am offering you a story you can't refuse."

"You know," he said amiably, trying not to be offensive, "unless it's about fishing, it wouldn't interest me." He studied the ashen pouches under Diaz's eyes, his slicked-back hair; the deputy's suave demeanor now turned tense and, Payne sensed, dangerous, trying to judge if he had to obey this man.

"Something like a type of fishing, Señor Payne." He heard the impatience in the deputy's voice. Diaz's lip lifted in a self-aware smile, recognizing a joke he never intended. "Yes, about fishing. Please get in the car."

They rode in air-conditioned silence (continued on page 150) Havana (continued from page 120) past the security checkpoint at the entrance to the marina, the blue-uniformed guards saluting the jeep and then quickly chopping their forearms again for the Mercedes. Then they were speeding down a boulevard canopied by huge ficus trees, through the formerly glamorous neighborhood of Miramar, the elegant old mansions divided into offices and apartments or simply boarded up like the Soviet embassy. Then the Mercedes turned inland onto a short freeway through a more modern version of Miramar, equally grand but less colonial, past the construction site for a new convention center, through a buffer zone of jungle and then out a long, dusty strip of warehouses and industrial sites, past the airport and into the flat countryside until they were approaching what seemed even from a distance to be a military base. Payne slumped in the leather seat, the Cuba libre from the marina still clutched in his hand, dismayed that he had been swept up into whatever was happening.

"When are you going to tell me what's going on?"

"There is a justice that must be witnessed by an international observer."

"What's that have to do with me?"

"You are a journalist, no?"

"That would be a loose interpretation of what I am."

"Our chief was given a list from our agency," Diaz shrugged. "He selected you."

"He selected me." Payne couldn't stop himself from just letting go with a snor.

"Why would he choose me? Who is your fucking chief?"

"Hombre," the official laughed. "The fucking president, who else? Fidel."

The capricious nonsense of his anointment stunned Elliott Payne, the absurdity so pressurized it felt like a dark formless thing trapped in the car with them.

"Fidel selected me for what?"

Diaz sighed heavily. "An unfortunate business, I am sorry to tell you. You are to witness an execution."

For some minutes Payne didn't say anything, because he wasn't thinking anything. His brain had stopped, and all he felt was something in his stomach like a large stone; he wanted to stand in a cold shower and brush his teeth and get on with the day. They drove through the gate of the base, down a one-lane macadam road lined with royal palm trees, the inviting green lawns on either side of the drive eerily deserted, and parked in a roundabout in front of a barracks or possibly an administrative center built during a past century, a colonnaded portico running the length of the grand structure, tall windows with deep casements in the thick concrete of the ochre-colored walls, a barn-red tin roof streaked with rust.

"That's fucked-up," Payne finally said, almost in a whisper, almost out of breath.

"I agree with you."

"Look. Listen! I don't want to," said Elliott Payne, but his protest sounded childish, and even as the words left his mouth he knew, without understanding why, that he did.

•

The affair proceeded with astonishing informality, an atmosphere to which Elliott Payne contributed with his own appearance, his nylon fishing shorts and deck shoes and rumpled short-sleeve linen shirt, his scuffed and water-stained pigskin shoulder bag, his polarized sunglasses and, most of all, in his hand the complimentary drink in its plastic cup, which he had neither finished nor thrown away, as if he were breezing around town, some fun guy joining the party. Diaz and Payne marched through an arched breezeway dividing the building in half, the quartet of soldiers from the jeep straggling behind, rifles slung over their shoulders or carried carelessly with the barrels down. On the back side of the building was a parade ground, the grass worn and patchy. At one end of the field sat a cube of concrete, a windowless building like a cake box, perhaps a former armory, the same mustard color you saw so often on old government buildings in the tropics, and it was to this building's large wooden door, guarded by a sentry with a face frozen by apathy, that the two men and their escort walked without speaking. There was a swirl of buzzards pinwheeling in the sky above them, but there were always buzzards in the sky in Cuba, and the writer found no portent in them. Diaz said something to the sentry, who opened the door, and they stepped inside and the sentry closed the door behind them, its sound vibrating in the shadows of a large single room softly illuminated by a pair of grime-streaked skylights on the high roof, the four walls thinly painted a wash of Mediterranean blue. Near the wall opposite the door was a long table, and near one end of the table, sitting on plain wooden chairs, were four military officers in dress uniforms, high-ranking as far as Payne could guess from their rows of ribbons and medals, although he was unfamiliar with the insignia. The men were laughing, their laughter warm and rich and effusive as the door swung open, their hats on the table, each man cradling a demitasse of coffee in his palms like a small flame he meant to keep from blowing out, and near at hand were water glasses and a corked and unlabeled bottle of liquor.

The laughing withered but not the incongruity of it. The officers sipped from their cups and turned their heads slowly toward the visitors. Elliott had the good sense to remove his sunglasses and let his eyes adjust to the dimness of the room. He inhaled the dampness of the ancient concrete and felt oddly soothed by its pungency.

"My. friend, do us the honor of having a drink with us on this day." The speaker addressed Payne in perfect English, unaccented to his Southern ear. The man to this man's right, a mulatto, interrupted, barking in Spanish at Diaz, who began to protest but thought better of it and withdrew sourly back through the door to wait outside. "Come and sit here at the table."

"You're American."

"Cuban-born. I lived in the States—Daytona, then New Orleans—for a few years. Know thine enemy." It was unmistakable in this speaker's voice—so much pleasure in his hatred for America, how could he ever give it up?

"Thine or thy or thou—can you tell me which is correct, Señor?" By age the most senior officer, thin and white-haired and imperturbable, this man spoke English in an accent so thick Elliott Payne found him difficult to understand, but he looked at the writer with gray eyes that were penetrating but not unkind and an intimate smile as if they had already met, as if perhaps the guy even liked him.

"I don't know," said Payne, taking an empty seat at the table across from him. "Nobody talks like that anymore."

"Ah. Of course."

There were two generals—courtly, white-haired Rivera and beefy General Ocampo, a huge black man bursting the seams of his overstarched uniform, who spoke no English and had eyes like hard-boiled eggs sunk in the jolly pudding of his face—and two colonels—the stern, poker-faced mulatto who had ordered Diaz from the room and who remained unintroduced (or rather nameless, acknowledging the writer with an icy nod and appraising him without mercy), and the other, Colonel Roberto Fernandez, whose fluent American English retained the vestige of a Southern drawl. "Call me Bobby," he told Payne. Unlike the others, he stood to shake his hand good-naturedly, no taller than the Napoleonic Doc Billy but broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped and athletic, gentle curls of brown hair receding from the center of his high forehead in the horseshoe shape of the laurels that once adorned Roman senators. He had a magnetic and boyish but slightly cruel smile that Payne knew many women would find irresistible, and generous brown eyes that gave the agreeable impression that the colonel was a man inclined to listen to you. Payne would have allowed himself to believe that Diaz and these four men were playing a very elaborate joke on him were it not for the undeniable sensation, like a racing pulse, of bad energy pumping through this room as, with Diaz's announcement of his mission, it had pumped through the car. The amazing thing was, something terrible was about to happen, but nobody seemed to be too put out by it.

Uncorking the bottle on the table, General Rivera asked Elliott Payne what was in his cup. "Drink it or throw it out," he said with too much gruff enthusiasm, but he took the cup itself and dumped its contents on the floor behind him. He refilled the cup halfway from the bottle and added equal amounts to the other glasses on the table, and then the general raised his own in the air, admiring its amber glow. The toast that Payne anticipated was not immediately forthcoming. Instead General Rivera wanted to say something about the rum he had poured, the privilege of its rare existence; it had been barreled in 1961 and tapped infrequently in the intervening years—once upon his promotion to flag officer and then his promotion to the military's chief of special operations, once upon his return to the island from Angola, once upon his son's birth, again on the boy's graduation from medical school, again upon his own retirement from the army and once more, today, to celebrate the life of his protégé, his adopted son, Bobby, the now middle-aged man he had mentored and trained to be an elite warrior of the revolution. Havana Club, the general declared reverently, from the most private of reserves, 40 years old, finer than the finest cognacs, the most excellent rum in the world. The general raised his glass higher.

"To Colonel Roberto Carlos Fernandez de Valdez and the triumph of the motherland."

"Socialismo o muerte," said General Ocampo.

"El Jefe," said the mulatto with an exaggerated gust like a sharp rap of fingers on a drum, and then all eyes turned to Fernandez to see what he would say.

"Viva Bacardi," he proclaimed to whoops of delight, the strained tone of their laughter striking Payne as increasingly artificial, somewhere low within it the hollow tones of doom. "Salud," he managed, and everyone drank, sipping at the smooth golden fire of the rum, the officers making gentle savoring sounds of appreciation. Too readily the general refilled the glasses, placing the empty bottle on the floor where Payne now noticed a second bottle, also empty. He was not surprised by the revelation that in all likelihood these men were drunk, and here was the patriarch with a lopsided smile pulling a third bottle from a bag at his feet.

"Compañero, we were talking about Arturo Suarez," said Colonel Fernandez, focusing on Payne. "Do you know him?"

"No. I've read his books. One of them."

"He is one of the revolution's little dogs. These little dogs come running from all over the world to lick and play with the revolution. But now the revolution has no milk for them. Maybe they will go away."

General Ocampo said something, his voice like a xylophone, and Colonel Fernandez translated for the writer's benefit. "Ocampo says, 'Shit attracts flies, and revolutionists attract beautiful people.' Man, you would not believe the ass that Fidel gets. He does not fuck peasants, let me tell you."

"But who will dine with us if they go away?" said General Rivera, winking.

"You look old enough," said Colonel Fernandez, making an effort to sound reasoned and disinterested, but an escalation in the style of his speaking barely contained his hostility. "Did you serve in Vietnam?"

"No," said Payne. "I was too young."

"General Ocampo was my commander in Grenada, and General Rivera was my father's best friend. He has shrapnel in his body from when he tried to save my father's life in the Sierra Maestra. I've known him since I was a little boy. He is a Hero of the Revolution. Coño, we are all Heroes of the Revolution."

He repeated this in Spanish to his companions and they chuckled like crows, lighthearted and conspiratorial, except for the unnamed colonel who mirrored their humor with an edgy reluctance, forcing himself to be entertained by their secrets, so many secrets and subterfuges and lies required to ride the tiger of revolution that one was made giddy, apparently, by their profusion.

"I was born in Pinar del Rio and grew up in Florida—Daytona, not Miami," said Colonel Fernandez, beginning to be visibly affected by the rum. He stopped abruptly and looked at Elliott Payne with piercing scrutiny. "Excuse me, why aren't you writing this down?"

"Right," said Payne, and from his bag he dug out a notebook and pen.

"I came home to the little country that told the big country to go fuck itself," Fernandez continued with incurable nostalgia, "and we must never apologize for that, never, not on earth and not in heaven. Do you believe we should apologize for that?"

"No."

"What should we apologize for?"

"Nothing. I don't know."

"My friend, what would you like to ask me?"

"Why are you being executed? It is you, isn't it?"

The colonel's expression was both mocking and arrogant, and he raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips clownishly and answered, "Economics."

"Okay," said Payne, not caring about an explanation. "And why am I here?"

"You," said the colonel with sly regard, "are my last request."

And yes, that was true, but only technically. Elliott Payne was not who the colonel had in mind when, in the depths of gloomy defiance from confinement elsewhere on the base, he had asked General Rivera to intercede with Castro on his behalf and permit a member of the foreign press to attend what tomorrow the Cuban press would describe with solemn, scorning righteousness as "the justice delivered to the traitor Colonel Fernandez for the unacceptable crime of narco-trafficking"; the colonel's rogue actions had "supplied arguments to the enemies of revolution." Drugs out, tourists in—that was the immediate and timely message to foreign investors, or at least the window dressing required to thwart Washington's opposition to Cuba's blooming sweetheart deals around the globe. "So he kills me," the colonel said now. "It's that simple." He had fallen from grace, a fatal condition for a man like Bobby Fernandez, in a place like Cuba. The colonel was a man of the world, specifically a man of the business world. He and his cadre of special operatives had kept this country going for much of the past decade when it would otherwise have disassembled and bobbed in the sea like so much ideological sewage. Which was the higher virtue, the purity of ideology or the impurity of survival, and who on the revolutionary council wanted to answer that? Most of what he had done, the important things, had been done without the chief's knowledge and assent, because he was and always had been and had no desire to be anything but a warrior in service of the revolution. He waged a clever form of sabotage against the colossus, the enemy's weakness transformed into Cuba's strength, helping the enemy rot from within, accelerating the natural process of imperial decay, but the problem was you couldn't feed enough poison to an enemy whose appetite for filth was boundless. In the end it was impractical and finally an embarrassment. Not even Castro would deny that the colonel had earned his right to petition, and he had allowed his honor to convince him that his request was justifiable and had let his vanity assume he would be attended in accord with his erstwhile status. With the chief's blessings, the colonel would be permitted to tell his story, unstained by the official version. And who was this man Elliott Payne? Someone from The New York Times, from The Wall Street Journal, someone credible and trustworthy, somebody from the Financial Times, from The Guardian, from Le Monde, from fucking People magazine, what did it matter? A mule whose only purpose in life was to freight the deeds and facts of the other men on his back. He was here, he had come to receive the unique gift of the experience that was Bobby Fernandez's heroic life, and it was his duty to respect that gift and share it with the universe.

The colonel calmed the gathering dread in his mind and drank down another glass of rum, the last gulp causing him to wheeze through a clenched jaw, and then he became eloquent and spoke to Elliott Payne, only to him. Payne guiltily wrote down every word he said, guilty yet in awe of the miracle of Bobby Fernandez, a living man on the verge of being swallowed by eternity, this miracle of talking to a dead man, in a sense the first knot in his own existence that he had encountered but could not untie.

"The possibilities of a revolution, like the possibilities of a man's life, become limited by the passage of time. You miss opportunities that will not return. You make small mistakes that develop into big mistakes, regrettable and unfixable errors, you misjudge the consequences of what you imagine are insignificant actions, you fail to imagine the best options, and you begin to lose companions who were necessary to your strength and acquire others who contribute to your weakness. A revolution is an act of unsurpassable will, but collective will. One man's will is not supreme enough, immortal enough, to carry the burden of people forward. And so——"

"Basta."

The unnamed colonel looked at his gold wristwatch and stood up, straight and erect and foreboding. Had Fernandez gone too far, Payne wondered, or had the appointed hour simply arrived? General Rivera and General Ocampo seemed mildly aggrieved by this interruption, and Rivera frowned and clucked his tongue at the mulatto, as if to scold him for not understanding that Bobby Fernandez was entitled to this foolishness. The writer, still copying down the last sentence, experienced a pang of tenderness for the condemned man, but it felt dishonest; the whole goddamn performance was a radical imposition on his soul. Bobby Fernandez raised his head, an element of theatrics to his grim serenity, and his eyes passed across them glassily, all friends, all comrades, all as treacherous as himself. His eyes glistened, but he did not cry, and he did not lose his composure but became dignified and then pliant. He swayed to his feet, and then they took him out to the parade ground and shot him, drunk but steady and grinning crookedly with an insolence meant only to affirm his manhood, a small portable cassette player trembling in his hands and headphones wrapped over his ears beneath his peaked hat, nodding coolly at the blast of Jimi Hendrix into the final synaptic sequence of his brain. A soldier with a handheld video camera filmed it all.

When the bullets hit, Elliott Payne completely lost his equilibrium and felt his own knees buckle. He gasped as Fernandez gasped, and the impact threw the colonel's head back. He found himself unprepared for the shame and incomprehensibility of death, the instantaneous creepy calm of its aftermath. How could he be so shocked, why had he doubted these men would actually do what they had told him they would do? Seeing a man ritualistically shot, the morbid ceremony of a firing squad, was both too little and too much. He had not imagined the permanent stamp of its horror, and when his legs ceased quaking and he could walk again, he turned away from it, the spell of the ordeal not broken but just beginning. There was Diaz, mopping sweat from his brow with a handkerchief, then wiping his entire face with too much vigor, which for some reason disgusted Payne. He looked up at the sky, darkening with thunderheads, and when he looked back down, the two generals were in front of him, their faces stricken with the perfect calculation of sadness and pity. "You helped him," said General Rivera, squeezing Payne's shoulder. "You gave him comfort," the black general said in mournful Spanish.

"Yeah," said Elliott Payne. "You bet."

The two generals shambled away toward a waiting car, their faces drawn and shoulders sagging, men of distinction entangled by the vast embitterment of duty, complacent in victory and complicit in the murderous offense of the circumstances. Payne watched the odious mulatto approach Diaz and harangue the deputy and prod him across the grass toward the American writer while a pickup truck pulled onto the grounds and soldiers heaved the body of Bobby Fernandez into its bed. He stared at the sullen Diaz, his numbness untouched by the deputy's humiliation, thinking how well servility suited him.

"This man says something for you," Diaz sputtered, clumsy with his translation, and waited for the mulatto to continue, which he did with harsh, bright-eyed fury. "Okay," said Diaz. "He says that those two men could do something but did nothing." Diaz paused while the unnamed colonel machine-gunned him again with language, then turned to burn his eyes into Elliott Payne. "Okay, he says that Bobby Fernandez was theirs, but they would not"—he quickly turned to the mulatto for a clarification—"okay, he says stand with him. Colonel Fernandez. You understand? They would not stand with him. What is the word?"

"Look, I don't care," said Payne. "Can I go now?"

The nameless colonel nodded at the writer, satisfied in his assumption that the truth had passed between them, but before he would release him he had a favor to ask. Bobby Fernandez had a habit that was not cocaine but a subtler passion, writing poetry, which he had rarely shown even to his comrades. The mulatto was holding a cheap vinyl portfolio clutched to his stomach, containing, he said, Fernandez's writings. He wanted Elliott Payne to take these and give them to the dead man's mother in Miami. The portfolio couldn't just be dropped in the mail, because there was no confirmed address, but surely Señior Payne could track her down and deliver this legacy. Please, said the deputy, distressed by the mulatto's insistence. Although Payne had no intention of following through on the request, he agreed just to get away from him, to get out of there.

On the ride back, the light began to fail and angry clouds scraped low over Havana, sending down columns of purple rain over the silenced barrios. Banks of steam erupted from the streets, wisps like puffs of smoke snagging in the tree-tops. For some reason his muscles, every one of them, ached as if he had been out on the high seas in a storm, his body tossed and pounded. Diaz cleared his throat once as if he might say something but didn't until minutes later when he cleared it again and asked the American, "How did you find Havana?" Even if Payne had wanted to talk, what could you say about Havana? Restless at the marina the previous night, he had asked his Cubanacán driver to take him to the old section of the city, down narrow cobbled alleys vaguely Neapolitan, to have a drink at Hemingway's old hangout La Bodeguita del Medio. Behind the counter, two bartenders manufactured endless mojitos, 20 at a time, for the relentless tide of thirsty Germans and Mexicans and Canadians that churned through, sweeping in and sweeping out, an unprecedented tide of tourists glancing cross-eyed at the ubiquitous graffiti and taking deep, dizzying whiffs of the pathos of bohemian Cuba. Across the street three plainclothes police officers stood like statuary, arms folded, glowering at the imported euphoria, and beyond them in the expansive darkness of the city all the pretty girls and boys of the revolution offering themselves for a meal or a bar of soap or a bottle of nail polish or the change in your pocket, and behind the doors of the city their cowed and disheartened parents, suspicious of one another, their lips glued by fear, and behind them Havana herself, an exotic passion permanently flaunting the edges of self-destruction, semi-feral but with hip intensity, sliding up to disaster and then fluttering away, a city like a Latin woman, beautiful but exhausted, dancing through the perfumed night with a gun in her hand, her destiny rehabilitated this very afternoon—by what? This cleansing of a state like a whore's bath, a quick wipe between the legs and let the next customer into the parlor? But he didn't feel like telling Diaz any of this, so he said nothing but closed his eyes and didn't open them again until the Mercedes stopped and the driver opened the door and Diaz took his elbow again to say, "You know this man Fernandez, he was escoria—scum, a psychopath," and he was back at the marina, stepping through the puddles to the bar, looking for a waste can where he could toss the portfolio. He heard clapping behind the hedges of oleander, feedback on a microphone, the wooden cadence of someone reading a speech.

An hour later he was still nursing the same beer when the men from the Cerebella found him there. "My boy Payne, where have you been?" Doc Billy said, braying at him like a jackass. "You missed it. They gave me an award," and that was lovely, wasn't it, the artful resiliency of the revolution, taking everyone by the elbow, whispering its grim seduction. How could it not, after all, have given him something, however small, that would be remembered.

"You know the godfather, yes? Everyone knows the godfather. I am offering you a story you can't refuse."