PART IV
Another Life
Chapter THIRTY-SEVEN
Though she’d long since torn up Cesar Castillo’s letter, a dozen others, from Nestor himself, were among the items that María chose to take along with her some three years later, in early 1961, when she’d leave Havana for Florida with her little daughter, Teresita. Not that she hated Fidel Castro as much as some of the Cuban exiles she’d meet there over the coming decades—she thought he was doing some good things for the people, especially the guajiros, particularly when it came to his literacy campaign and sending doctors into the sticks; and she supposed that anyone would have been better than Batista, whom everybody knew was some kind of crook. Caught up in the initial jubilation, she had been among the crowds lining the streets of Havana as Fidel and his followers made their triumphant procession on captured tanks and jeeps and trucks through the city in the second week of 1959, after they’d routed Batista’s forces in the wake of their successful guerrilla war. She’d hoisted up her daughter—not even a year old yet—so that the heroic leader might see her as he passed, but it wasn’t long before she, like so many others, as in a fiery romance, started taking a second look.
At first, though, María had liked him and what he seemed to stand for. She could even lay claim to having met Fidel, however briefly. Five months after María had given birth to Teresita, in a sixteen-hour labor passed in the maternity ward of the Calixto García Hospital, she had returned to work as a fill-in dancer and assistant to the choreographer at the cabaret in the newly constructed Havana Hilton hotel, a spectacular, fully air-conditioned high-rise out in Vedado, its fa?ade boasting of a mosaic mural by the artist Amelia Peláez (for most of that year, 1958, she and Ignacio had watched the construction cranes and their crews at work from their terrace). That’s where Castro established his headquarters, the rebel leader taking a suite on an upper floor. The dancers in the cabaret, María among them, got used to seeing him strolling through the lobby on his way to the hotel diner, where he ate his meals. On one of those evenings, Castro and some of his men took in one of their shows; afterwards he made a point of going backstage and shaking hands with each of the performers and musicians.
“I have to confess,” she would tell her ever-patient daughter one day, “that it was a thrill. He was tall and broad shouldered, muy bien macho with a handsome enough face, and the way he looked at me, I knew what he was secretly thinking. In fact, even after I had given birth to you, Teresita, I hadn’t lost any of my beauty or my figure—a lot of my friends told me that I looked even better than before. I had added a little to my pecho”—she would pat at her breasts—“and my happiness at having you, even when you don’t think I was happy, made my face even more lovely than before. Of course, I felt flattered by the way he had looked at me, but that was all. I had no interest in him, and I wasn’t imagining things, by the way, hijita…. Later on, when one of his guards approached me to say that the comandante’s door was open to me any time I wanted to speak to him, I had to say to myself, ‘About what?’ He was a man, after all, and so I kept my distance, though I swore that, if I went up there, like some of the other girls—I mean if I was forced to—I would use that old trick I had up my sleeve, you know, the one I told you about with the shaking that I remembered from my beloved sister, but, gracias a Dios, that never came to pass….”
There had been the summary executions of a number of former Batista henchmen, members of his police force and secret service—their trials were broadcast on the radio and shown on television. And in that atmosphere of quick justice and reform, in which Castro had pledged to rid Havana of its criminal elements, when the casinos were closed and the whores and their pimps rounded up, Ignacio, Teresita’s father, if not by marriage by fact, was arrested after his warehouse in the harbor had been raided and found to contain stolen goods. Or, to put it differently, at the tail end of a happy year as a doting papito to Teresita and a caring enough companion to María, Ignacio went out one morning and did not come home. During a trial, which María could not attend because she simply did not know what had happened to him, Ignacio, whom she considered a good provider and an essentially honest man, however he had made his living, was sentenced to serve ten years at a prison on the Isle of Pines.
She never saw him again, el pobre. (But how could it have turned out well for Ignacio, when anyone María cared for seemed destined to a miserable fate?)
Along the way, the clubs, cabarets, and casinos, and every maison de joie, as the bordellos had been sometimes called, were closed down, then reopened, then closed down again. Tourism died, and when María managed to scrounge up work as a dancer, she usually performed to half empty houses. Not all was misery, however: she had been moonlighting at the Parisien cabaret, in the Hotel Nacional, when the dressing rooms began to buzz with excitement over the American celebrity, of Cuban descent, who had come by to catch the heart-wrenching vocalizations of the Mexican singer, the one and only Pedro Vargas—you know, the star of that show, famous in America, the Cuban she’d see again and again on reruns in the future: Desi Arnaz. The performers sort of knew who he happened to be, but before any doubts could set in, their emcee introduced him to the crowd and asked Mr. Arnaz to stand up and take a bow. She could see why he was well known; handsome as hell and with a wonderful smile, he emanated warmth and kindness. At the same time, María happened to notice that, as with Nestor, as with perhaps many a Cuban man of a certain bent of emotion, he seemed a little sad—perhaps he sensed what was to come. In any event, Arnaz had a friend in the house band’s pianist, a fellow named Pepe, and it was he who later told the troupe about why Desi Arnaz had come to Havana just then, in the wake of the Cuban revolution: to gather up orchestrations by his arranger, Marco Rizo, who had kept a backlog of charts in his Vedado apartment—in fact, it would be the last time that the most famous Cuban before Fidel Castro stepped on Cuban soil.
EVENTUALLY, ONCE THE REVOLUTION CHANGED EVERYTHING, beautiful María started to consider something that had been unthinkable to her before: and that was to leave Cuba for the United States. Not to stay in Miami necessarily, but perhaps to go to a place called Las Vegas, which she’d been told was like a Havana in the desert of the American West. She knew this from a magician named Fausto Morales, who used to work the la Rampa circuit and had, like so many other male performers, a fondness for María. The last time she had seen him at the Lantern, in early 1957, he’d told her about his plans to move there, mainly to perform in the big-time nightclubs, where acts like Frank Sinatra and Perry Como were the attractions, but also to open a school for magicians, who were always in demand. (Years later, her daughter, Teresita, would read somewhere that David Copperfield was one of Fausto’s pupils.) He’d left her with an open invitation—any time María wanted a change of scenery, and a good livelihood as well, Las Vegas was an option. Perhaps, she thought, one day she would take him up on his offer.
In the spring of 1961, when María finally left for Miami aboard a Pan Am Clipper with her little daughter, she took nothing more for herself than a few dresses and some other essentials; everything else—the furnishings of her apartment in Vedado, the money in her bank account (some $2,237)—was confiscated. (She managed to bury several pieces of jewelry in a metal box under the base of an acacia tree out in Pinar del Río, the rest, from earrings to silver and gold chains, save the one that Nestor had given her and a precious Timex, a gift from Ignacio, she gave away.) Without any close family in Cuba, beautiful María stashed what remained of her past in that suitcase: those photographs of her mamá and her papito, of Nestor Castillo and herself taken in the good times; and photos of María in her dancer’s glory, and dressing room shots posed with the comedians, actors, and radio and television performers who used to frequent the places she worked—she brought their pictures as well. And it was not as if she would forget Ignacio. But aside from those items, a crucifix, a handful of precious letters, and one of those notebooks she had filled up for Lázaro were all she managed to bring with her, all that remained of her world. Of course she’d filled an entire suitcase for Teresita, who, not quite four but brainy and alert, if not as pretty as her mother would have wanted—the poor girl taking more after Ignacio—managed to understand that many of the adults on that half-hour flight were very sad….
Even her mother, beautiful María, when not telling Teresita to stop chewing on her fingers and to sit up straight like a proper girl, seemed apprehensive, looking out the airplane window as if she wanted to lose herself in the silver-bottomed clouds. After landing at Miami International Airport, at the end of a trip that had passed in the snap of a finger, the passengers conversing quietly among themselves—the words “?Qué lástima!”—“What a pity!” repeated again and again—María showed hardly any emotion at all. Far from behaving like a bewildered guajira of the countryside, she strolled towards passport control, her daughter’s hand in her own, with incredible dignity, the same face, now past thirty, that had graced the billboards and beer trays of Havana, and had provoked a thousand dreams as she walked in the streets of her city, seemingly transformed. American flags, U.S. immigration officials moving about, a framed portrait of the president, John F. Kennedy. Only once did María nearly lose it, as they had passed into the arrivals lounge and not a single person among the hundreds of Cubans—from Tampa, from Miami itself, and from other towns and cities around the state—had been on hand to welcome them with the hugs, embraces, and kisses that made it such an emotional moment for so many others. Looking about, with only twenty dollars to her name and not a clue as to how to proceed, María took a deep breath and squeezed her daughter’s hand tightly, as if she were never going to let it go. Fortunately, a nun of Cuban descent, accompanied by an American priest who happened to speak a pretty passable Spanish, had picked María and her daughter out from the crowd, simply because they seemed so alone, without family to look after them. But while that disorientation and the very strangeness of that new setting may have made a less hardened sort cry a little, that was not María at all.
“Put on your prettiest smile, mi vida,” beautiful María told her daughter.
In fact, if anything, she couldn’t help but laugh, a half mad look in her eyes. For as they were making their way towards the exit doors, to the curbside where a Catholic Relief Services van waited to take them to a motel, little Teresita, hopping daintily along as if to a picnic, as graceful as María had been in the countryside, there trumpeted through the terminal a piece of Muzak which, to her bemusement, happened to be that song of love, as performed by the Lawrence Welk Orchestra. “Beautiful María of My Soul”—as if Nestor, watching her from afar, couldn’t help but say: “I’m still here, my love. Whether you want me or not, I’m still here.”