Spy in a Little Black Dress

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So tell me, what did you think of La Europa?” Emiliano asked Jackie over lunch at Café Rodney, the Tropicana’s charmingly bohemian restaurant.

“It’s a strange place,” she said after a long moment. “You never know who you’ll bump into there.”

Not wishing to elaborate any further on the chance encounters of the night before, Jackie sipped her mojito, savoring the way the citrus and mint flavors enhanced the kick of the rum—I could get addicted to these, she thought—and quickly changed the subject. “The Nacional is absolutely magnificent, Emiliano. It was so good of you to arrange for me to stay there.”

“Deputy Director Dulles is the one you should be thanking. I was only the messenger. When I told Mr. Dulles about the unfortunate experience that happened to you on your first day here, he was very sorry to hear it. He wanted to make it up to you, so he chose a world-class hotel that has airtight security. You know, Winston Churchill and his wife stayed there after the war. It’s a luxurious place, but it’s also very safe.”

“I hadn’t counted on such a treat,” Jackie said, remembering her delighted surprise when Emiliano told the cabdriver outside La Europa to take them to the Nacional. She couldn’t believe how short the cab ride was from the sleazy club to the legendary hotel in Vedado. It was like going from the Bowery to Park Avenue in the blink of an eye.

Glorious, Jackie had murmured to herself as she stepped out of the taxi and admired the breathtakingly lush tropical setting of tall royal palms, giant fruit trees, and cascading fountains. It was also apparent to Jackie that with so many eye-catching sights to behold and so many famous people around, Dulles had assumed that a nobody like Jacqueline Bouvier was likely to go unnoticed. Why would anyone be looking at her when they could be ogling big-name stars like Gary Cooper, Rita Hayworth, or John Wayne?

“Don’t worry about your suitcase,” Emiliano had told her before she checked into the hotel. “I already arranged for it to be sent up to your room.”

Once again, Jackie had been impressed with how considerate Emiliano was. He’s going to make some woman a good husband one day, she’d thought, if he ever warms up a bit.

Standing in line at the reception desk, Jackie began tapping her foot impatiently as she waited behind a woman giving the clerk a litany of instructions in a thick European accent. A bellhop stood by with the woman’s truckload of Louis Vuitton luggage, looking as if he had turned to marble. Finally, the tall, urbane-looking man at the woman’s side prodded her arm.

“Zsa Zsa darling, I’d rather not spend the entire night in the lobby, if you don’t mind. Let’s get on with it, shall we?” the man said in a smooth, upper-class British accent. Jackie had thought he looked familiar, but now he was immediately recognizable. George Sanders! Addison DeWitt, the acerbic theatre critic in All About Eve, an Academy Award–winning role come to life. And the woman ahead of Jackie was his famous movie-star wife, one of the glamorous Hungarian-born Gabor sisters. When Zsa Zsa turned to her husband and nodded, Jackie was so dazzled by the perfection of her heart-shaped face and porcelain skin that her impatience gave way to awe.

“I heard from Fidel’s contact, and he apologized profusely for not showing up,” Emiliano was saying when their lunch arrived. “I asked him what happened, and all he would say was that he had run into some trouble with the secret police. But he promised to meet with us tomorrow and swore that he would be there. So that gives us this whole day to ourselves.”

“Well, you couldn’t have picked a better place for lunch,” Jackie said.

The Tropicana, surrounded by colorful tropical foliage, was every bit as spectacular as the Nacional. Jackie had been struck by the beauty of the Nymphs Fountain at the entrance to the casino and the lovely ballerina sculpture in front of the outdoor nightclub adjoining the casino, the world-famous Paradise Under the Stars.

Jackie’s guidebook had raved about the club’s spectacular shows featuring a cast of more than a hundred dancers and musicians, the dancers performing on aerial walkways around the treetops. She could see why the Tropicana was known as a mecca for tourists, international celebrities, beautiful women, and well-heeled gangsters.

And now, incredibly, here she sat, having lunch with Emiliano in Café Rodney, named after Roderico Neyra, the famous choreographer known in Cuban song and dance circles simply as Rodney. Born a leper and raised in a leper colony, according to Emiliano—was there anything this man didn’t know?—Rodney had launched his career with a burlesque show at the Shanghai, one of Havana’s most notorious strip clubs. From there, he worked as head choreographer at the elegant Sans Souci, staging lavish, talk-of-the-town, Afro-Caribbean shows for shock value and fun, until the nearby Tropicana had lured him away.

“This is delicious,” Jackie said, after her first mouthful of enchilado de camarones, a flavorful dish of shrimp, tomatoes, green bell pepper, onion, and garlic. “Back home we call this shrimp Creole, but this is an even tastier version.”

“I’m glad you like it,” Emiliano said. “After lunch, is there anything in particular that you’d like to do?”

“I haven’t really thought about it,” Jackie said. “We could walk around the grounds, but I’d rather not go into the casino. I’m not much of a gambler.” When your job pays $42.50 a week, there’s not a whole lot to play with, she said to herself.

“I don’t like it either, but I’m afraid gambling has become Cuba’s national pastime. There’s the official national lottery—the legal one—and then there’s the bolita, the black market numbers game where Martin Fox made all his money before he bought the Tropicana.”

“He must be making a lot more with the casino here,” Jackie said, remembering the line of shiny black Cadillacs and long white limousines bringing patrons to the casino last night when her cab pulled up in front of the hotel.

“Oh, yes, a casino is a license to print money. The big ones rake in millions of pesos a day, and the gangsters and the crooks like Batista line their pockets with money from them.” Jackie could see a flash of anger in Emiliano’s eyes. “There’s something wrong when the people running things live like kings, and five hundred thousand campesinos live in miserable shacks, working four months in a year and starving the rest. The rich landowners live high off the hog while a hundred thousand poor farmers like my parents are feudal serfs who have to pay for using a small plot of land by giving up a share of its produce. Do you think that’s right?”

“No, of course not,” Jackie said, shaking her head, overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the numbers he had reeled off. “It’s terribly unfair for people who do an honest day’s work to be victimized so badly by a corrupt system. I feel sorry for them. Your heart would have to be made of stone if you didn’t.”

The anger faded from Emiliano’s eyes. “Forgive me for lecturing to you,” he said, looking slightly embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to spoil your lunch. We should talk about something more pleasant.” He thought for a moment. “I’ve seen some of your writing, and I have to say that I was quite impressed.”

“You mean my Inquiring Camera Girl articles?” Jackie asked, surprised. Emiliano seemed much too serious to appreciate lighthearted copy like that.

“No, the piece that you wrote for the Grand Prix contest.”

“Where on earth did you see that?”

“Deputy Director Dulles mentioned that you won the Vogue contest when he gave me some background on you. I wanted to see what you wrote, so I went to the library and got hold of the copy of the magazine that printed your winning essay in it.”

A true scholar, Jackie thought, flattered by Emiliano’s interest in her work but also somewhat uneasy at being snooped on in a way.

“And you liked what I wrote?”

“Very much. You’re an accomplished writer, Jacqueline, but I was wondering,” Emiliano said, sounding curious, “why did you pick Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde as literary subjects you wish you had known? They were rather decadent, weren’t they?”

Jackie laughed. “Yes, they were decadent, but that’s not why I chose them.” She didn’t want to tell Emiliano that she was drawn to Baudelaire and Wilde, both rich men’s sons who lived like dandies and ran through all their money and died in poverty, because they reminded her of her father’s plight. So she said, “I admired them because even though they wrote about the seamy side of life from firsthand experience, they were still idealists who believed in a better world. They brought about reform in their own way, not by leading a rebellion, but by using their words to accomplish what activists had been trying to do for years.”

Emiliano nodded. “Yes, sometimes, the pen is mightier than the sword, as they say. But I’m afraid there are other times when you need both the pen and the sword. And for Cuba, we’ve come to the point where words alone are not enough.”

“It’s sad to think that violence is the only answer,” Jackie said. She took another bite of her shrimp dish, gathering her thoughts before she went on. “I’ve done some background reading myself… on Fidel Castro… and there are people who say that although he’s an eloquent orator and very smart, with a lot of talent as a leader, he’s too fond of guns, too reckless. Do you think that’s true?”

Emiliano shook his head. “No, not really. That may have been true when we were freshmen in law school and gangsterismo was very popular. Young men, even educated ones like us, wanted to show how tough we were. You know, like imitating John Wayne in your country, which was rather foolish, I suppose.” He smiled in a self-deprecating way. “Fidel was like that, so he carried a fifteen-shot Browning pistol on his person all the time and got into fights with rival gangs. But in his senior year, he gave an impassioned speech against gangsterismo at the university before a group of administrators and students, and he hasn’t changed his position since then.”

Emiliano pointed his fork at Jackie like a defending counsel stressing a point in a closing argument to a jury. “Believe me, if there was a peaceful way to depose Batista, Fidel would be all for it. But when a dictator seizes power with a military junta and holds on to power by squashing protest with a murderous secret police force, a bloodless revolution is a vain hope.”

Much as she hated violence, Jackie was swayed by Emiliano’s discourse on Cuba’s dire straits. “You’re an eloquent speaker yourself, Emiliano,” she said. “You must be very effective in the courtroom.” Now it was her turn to be curious. “If you don’t mind my asking, how could poor farmers like your parents afford to send you to law school?”

“They couldn’t afford to,” Emiliano said simply. He pursed his lips. “Before I explain, let me give you some idea of how hard it was for my parents just to survive, let alone support a family. My father came to Cuba fresh off the boat from Spain in the early 1900s, with no prospects and no way of making a living. He met my mother, and they fell in love. He wanted to get married and start a family. But how, when he had no money? Then along came Major Walter Reed, the U.S. Army doctor. You’ve heard of him, I’m sure?

“Of course,” Jackie said quickly. “He was the one who conquered yellow fever. They even named a hospital after him. It’s in Washington, D.C.”

“Well, actually it was a Cuban doctor, Carlos Finley, who first had the idea that the germ that caused yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes,” Emiliano informed her. “Finley gave Reed a batch of mosquito eggs so he could grow them to adulthood and test out his theory. Volunteers were paid to see if they contracted the disease when they were bitten by the grown mosquitoes. Some of the men were drawn from the U.S. Army’s own ranks. Others were new immigrants from Spain. My father was one of the five Cuban volunteers on the first team. He knew there was every chance that he could contract the disease and die. But he wanted to help the doctor find a cure for this terrible scourge, and he said that if he couldn’t have my mother, life would not be worth living anyhow.” Emiliano’s eyes glowed with a look of filial affection and pride. “Obviously, my father survived, but you can imagine how desperate and deeply in love he was to take such a courageous step.”

“I can,” Jackie said softly as she felt a sudden wave of tenderness for Emiliano. She reached out and touched his cheek, wanting him to know how much she appreciated the poignancy of his father’s courage.

Emiliano blushed, but a smile played around his lips, and Jackie knew that her gesture was not lost on him. “Now, do you want to tell me how you could afford to go to law school?” she asked.

“I worked my way through as a cigar reader.”

A cigar reader? Was that like reading tea leaves? Emilio didn’t seem like the fortune-teller type. Jackie looked blank.

“I should have said a cigar-factory reader,” Emiliano corrected himself. “We have a long-standing tradition in Cuba of hiring people we call torcedores, or lectors, as you would say, to help our cigar-factory workers pass the time by reading to them while they roll the tobacco leaves into cigars. The lectors sit in the front of the factory room and read aloud all day long. They start out with the newspaper in the morning, and after that, it could be anything the workers might like—self-help books, magazines, modern novels, or classics.”

“That’s a wonderful idea, but doesn’t that distract them?”

“No, actually, it improves their concentration by keeping them from getting bored, and they’re not allowed to look at the reader or talk to their workmates because quotas have to be met. So instead of distracting the workers, the reading helps them keep on rolling cigars at top speed while it entertains and informs them.”

“Whoever thought of that was brilliant.”

“Ironically, the idea was originally developed for prisons. Nicolás Azcárate—he was an activist and intellectual back in the 1860s—proposed reading to people locked up in jail as part of their rehabilitation. And the link to the cigar industry came about since many prisoners rolled cigars to earn wages.”

“I can see the parallel,” Jackie said, nodding. “In a way, the tobacco workers are like prisoners too, only they’re locked up all day in cigar factories instead of jails.”

“Exactly,” Emiliano said, beaming at Jackie like a schoolteacher who has just gotten the right answer from a student called on in class.

I wish he would smile more, Jackie thought. He’s so gorgeous when he does.

But Emiliano quickly returned to his pedantic mode. “Most cigar workers have never read a book in their lives,” he said. “Many of them can’t even write their own names. The reading gives them their only access to literature and useful information about the outside world.” He smiled again, crookedly this time. “What the factory owners didn’t count on is that reading increases efficiency, but it also encourages revolutionary ideas. The cigar workers are probably the best-informed sector in the labor force right now, and we think they’ll be vital in the fight for independence.”

Jackie tried to imagine what she would read to the cigar workers if she were a lector. “There are so many books to choose from, I wouldn’t know where to begin,” she pondered.

“The workers have their favorites,” Emiliano said. “Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo has been popular for a long time. In fact, the book was read to them so often that they named the Montecristo cigar after it.”

“I was wondering where the cigar got that name,” Jackie said. “My stepfather smokes that brand.”

“Another favorite classic of the workers is Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. That’s where the name of the Romeo y Julieta cigar comes from.”

“Who knew cigars had such a rich cultural history?” Jackie said, laughing.

Emiliano’s eyes snapped as if a sudden idea had come to him. “Would you like to see the cigar factory where I worked as a lector? It’s in the Vedado, the University of Havana neighborhood. I can take us there in my car, and you can see an actual reading for yourself.”

“Oh, I’d love that,” Jackie said. “Let’s do it.”

Emiliano’s car was an old, bilious green Chevrolet, déclassé for the Tropicana, but not nearly so embarrassing as the rattletrap truck that had brought him to her when they first met.

“I like this neighborhood,” Jackie said when they entered the barrio of El Vedado. It was a pleasant downtown district with lots of exclusive-looking shops and businesses, a large public square, and an abundance of dance clubs and cabarets common to a university town. And of course, there was a movie theatre with the name YARA in bold letters on the front. It was not nearly as impressive as El Teatro de Cinema in Habana Vieja, but it looked large for a local theatre.

“Many film festivals are held in that movie house,” Emiliano said, pointing to the Yara, “and the round building in front is the Coppelia ice cream café, where the students like to congregate.”

When they came to a large building on the corner of Figuras Street—the H. UPMANN BUILDING, the sign said—Emiliano drove around to the back and parked on the lot.

“Upmann? That sounds German,” Jackie said as they walked toward the entrance.

“Yes, the company was founded by German immigrants. Two brothers who were bankers and cigar aficionados. They were always sending cigars back to their friends in Europe and finally decided to open their own factory, but it has Cuban owners now.” Before they went inside, Emiliano said, “You know, it doesn’t surprise me that your stepfather smokes Montecristos. Handmade Cuban cigars are very popular with the Washington crowd.”

Suddenly, Jackie remembered Jack Kennedy lighting up a cigar after dinner at the Bartletts and telling her that it had been made in Cuba. Oh great, all I need is to find him lurking inside this factory, she thought, the way he showed up at La Europa.

But inside, there was nothing except row upon row upon row of long wooden tables with workers seated on benches, side by side, eyes down, their hands busily flying. Seamlessly, one after another, the workers rolled leaves of tobacco into cylinders and clipped the ends as they listened to a matronly woman lector reading the Gaceta Oficial newspaper into a microphone from her perch on a chair on a high wooden platform. Except for the thick, tangy smell of tobacco that permeated the air, the room was like a huge study hall with exceptionally well-behaved students.

It was so hot and humid in the factory that Jackie had to fan her face with her hand. “They can’t have air-conditioning in here,” Emiliano explained, “because it would dry out the tobacco leaves.”

Jackie followed Emiliano to the front of the room, where he found a chair for her. Then she watched him withdraw what appeared to be a well-worn book from a stack of reading material, climb the steps of the platform, and greet the lector with a friendly smile. She smiled back, obviously happy to see him, exchanged a few words with him, and nodded.

Jackie assumed that Emiliano had selected a book for the lector to read. But to her surprise, the lector rose from her chair and descended the steps, and Emiliano took her place.

I hope he won’t lull the workers to sleep, Jackie thought nervously, but she sat up in her chair when Emiliano raised the book in his hand and announced the title into the microphone in a resonant voice that was like a call to arms: “Los Miserables.”

Great choice, Jackie thought. Victor Hugo’s masterpiece was one of her all-time favorites. She had actually devoured all nineteen hundred pages of it in French, mesmerized by the brilliance of the ideas and the emotional pull of characters like Jean Valjean, sentenced to nineteen years of hard labor in prison for stealing a loaf of bread, and Fantine, a poverty-stricken mother reduced to prostitution to pay for her daughter’s care. Les Misérables was so familiar to her, and French was so similar to Spanish, that Jackie was confident that she would grasp what Emiliano was about to read.

Before he began reading, Emiliano gave a short introductory speech about the book’s themes of struggle and redemption in France culminating in the July Revolution of 1830 and the student-led uprising of 1832. The similarity between France at that time and present-day Cuba was implicit.

“ ‘Chapter Twelve. The Future Latent in the People,’ ” Emiliano said in Spanish. Then he launched into the reading in a vibrant voice, more animated than his normal conversational tone, but it wasn’t until he was almost midway into the passage that he caught fire:

“ ‘There exist these immense numbers of unknown beings… rabble, multitude, populace. These are words and quickly uttered. But so be it. What does it matter? What is it to me if they do go barefoot! They do not know how to read; so much the worse. Would you abandon them for that? Would you turn their distress into a malediction? Cannot light penetrate these masses? Let us return to that cry: Light! And let us obstinately persist therein! Light! Light! Who knows whether these opacities will not become transparent? Are not revolutions transfigurations?’ ”

Jackie saw that the workers kept their eyes on their fingers, but she could feel excitement coursing through the room like an electrical current as Emiliano went on, becoming even more intense and passionate, his voice rising to a powerful crescendo:

“ ‘Sow enthusiasm, tear green boughs from the oaks. Make a whirlwind of the idea. This crowd may be rendered sublime. Let us learn how to make use of that vast conflagration of principles and virtues, which sparkles, bursts forth, and quivers at certain hours. These bare feet, these bare arms, these rags, this ignorance, this abjectness, this darkness may be employed in the conquest of the ideal. Gaze past the people, and you will perceive truth. Let that vile sand which you trample underfoot be cast into the furnace. Let it melt and seethe there. It will become a splendid crystal, and it is thanks to that, Galileo and Newton will discover stars.’ ”

Jackie’s eyes were moist when Emiliano closed the book and began to come down from the platform. Around her, the workers’ eyes were still fastened on their fingers busily rolling cigars, but she could tell from the expressions on their faces that Emiliano’s reading had touched their hearts as much as it had touched hers.

For the first time, Jackie had seen the fiery soul hidden behind Emiliano’s wall of reserve. No, he was not a tiger on horseback, but he was, she had discovered, a figure even more intriguing and magnetic to her—a sleeping tiger. And she wanted to be there when that tiger came to the fore again.

Jackie rose from her seat and was walking toward Emiliano to congratulate him on his performance when she felt a slight tug on her sleeve. She turned, and a small, thin Hispanic man who looked like a campesino wordlessly handed her a note and quickly walked away, disappearing through a side door. Jackie glanced at the slip of paper and read:

TOMORROW

THE DANCE ACADEMY

3 PM

When Jackie reached Emiliano, she smiled broadly at him and told him how wonderful she thought his reading had been. “I was thrilled by it, and so was everyone else.”

Then she showed him the note that the strange man had slipped into her hand. “Do you know what this is about?”

“Yes, the Dance Academy is where the rebels hold their meetings.” Emiliano said. The Dance Academy? That sounds promising, Jackie thought. Maybe I’ll finally get to do the mambo after all.