5,39 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Teeming with life and compulsively readable, the pieces gathered together in The Tribe aggregate into an extraordinary mosaic of Cuba today. Carlos Manuel Álvarez, one of the most exciting young writers in Latin America, employs the crónica form – a genre unique to Latin American writing that blends reportage, narrative non-fiction, and novelistic forms – to illuminate a particularly turbulent period in Cuban history, from the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the US, to the death of Fidel Castro, to the convulsions of the San Isidro Movement. Unique, edgy and stylishly written, The Tribe shows a society in flux, featuring sportsmen in exile, artists, nurses, underground musicians and household names, dissident poets, the hidden underclass at a landfill, migrants attempting to make their way across Central America, fugitives escaping the FBI, dealers from the black market, as well as revelers and policemen in the noisy Havana night. It is a major work of reportage by one of Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language novelists.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Ähnliche
‘There is magic in these pages…This book tells the actual story of Cuba as it exists today.’
— Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara
‘Álvarez does not try to instruct or speculate. He does not write on whether the Revolution succeeded or failed. He does not determine whether the leader was a hero or a tyrant. His book is not an explanation: it is … the history of a country told through its people.’
— María Teresa Hernández, AP News
Praise for The Fallen
‘A beautiful and painful novel that demonstrates the power of fiction to pursue the unutterable.’
— Alejandro Zambra, author of Chilean Poet
‘In a dysfunctional environment, deception invades private family life. The lines between truths and lies are blurred. In a poetic telling, this short novel explores the human capacity to love and to hurt.’
— Brigid O’Dea, Irish Times
‘A war foretold that never takes place. A death foretold that never takes place. And in the middle of this is the inevitable collapse of a family and a country. The Fallen is a subtle, intelligent and profoundly moving novel which sketches, in elegant and thoughtful prose, a rarely seen Cuban landscape.’
— Alia Trabucco Zerán, author of The Remainder
‘The Fallen is a museum of solitude and of the cracks separating our inner world from the one we live in and from those with whom we coexist.’
— Emiliano Monge, author of Among the Lost
THE TRIBE PORTRAITS OF CUBA
CARLOS MANUEL ÁLVAREZ
Translated by FRANK WYNNE with RAHUL BERY
CONTENTS
‘There is nothing more difficult than
to be a stepson of the time.’
—Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
tr. Robert Chandler
For Carla, whom I love, and who loves me.
POST-CASTRO CUBA, AN APPROXIMATION
I.
It is 17 December 2014. Barack Obama and Raúl Castro are announcing to the world that, after fifty-three years of hostile rift, the United States and Cuba are restoring diplomatic relations. Needless to say, this news is not as momentous to Americans as it is to Cubans. Hence the fact that the announcement leaves no gringos bewildered, wondering what is happening and what will happen next.
Cubans, on the other hand – we who effortlessly make an epic of the everyday, who don’t hesitate to declare the slightest skirmish or governmental whim a historic event – are instantly eaten up by questions, and frantically searching for some kind of clarity in our neighbours’ opinions in a way we never have before.
In the meantime, something exists that should not. Something that, in its present form, is unsustainable. A state of mind, perhaps: indecision, inertia, amnesia. Or the run-of-the-mill commonplace: our Cold War mindset, our deeply ideological sentimental education, a boundless bureaucracy, a ravaged social infrastructure. Beautiful, punch-drunk people that we are.
In an attempt to take no risks, Cuba took the greatest risk of all: it took none. As though the government has spent decades instilling in us the belief that the historical race we were running was a marathon, only to suddenly decide, with the beginnings of the thaw, that actually it wasn’t. The distance was – and is – a hundred-metre sprint, and we were competing against a country guilty of doping.
The first great test of the schism that has just riven the Cuban people can be found in our psyche. Here was something that would not only change the course of our economic, cultural and social realities, which in itself was more than enough, but that forced us to reinvent our language, the words we commonly used, the concepts to which we had adapted ourselves as a nation. Official policy abruptly changed, and with it the relationship and the discourse each of us had with that power, whatever the feelings it inspired in us: trust, love, hatred, disappointment, enthusiasm, revulsion. On Mesa Redonda (the televisual incarnation of official Cuban policy), the talking heads who, only a week earlier, were still referring to the United States as an ‘imperial force’, now, with an equanimity verging on effrontery, used the word ‘neighbour’.
And they were right after all. From then on, the United States was to be our neighbour. A notion that, if voiced by some reckless soul as recently as last night, would have earned them the shameful label antipatriotic. The lines so routinely trotted out in history books: ‘Such-and-such a country went to bed Capitalist and woke up Communist,’ or ‘such-and-such a region went to bed feudal and woke up bourgeois,’ was literally true in this case. Once upon a time, Cuba had cherished the magnificent dream of the Revolution, and our tragedy stemmed from the attempt to prolong that dream. After a long, protracted suspension spanning five decades, we woke to find the great ontological questions once again rattling around our brain: how are we going to contend with the United States? What will come of this struggle? Will our country be better or worse?
—
But there’s a certain wariness to what’s happening. As though the euphoria has been internalized, as though euphoria has left us anaesthetized. We splutter. We babble clichés. Rapture is a rare and slightly irrational phenomenon for us, like an opiate ingested by the whole island, a collective drug smoked by everyone. And in a sense, our reaction seems reasonable. Having spent so many years marching for every triviality, waving banners and placards to celebrate as many anniversaries as possible, we now deserve to celebrate the other way, silence as a scream.
Today there was a prisoner swap in which three pro-Castro intelligence agents were returned in exchange for an American government contractor and an American intelligence officer of Cuban origin. Newspaper headlines trumpeted the return of the three agents – who, with two colleagues who had already returned, had been raised to the rank of heroes. The front pages showed them at home, reunited with their families. The three of them meeting with Raúl Castro. Their return to their districts. Their neighbours hugging them and and carrying them on their shoulders.
‘Los Cinco’ – The Cuban Five – were part of the Red Avispa – the Wasp Network. In 1998, they had been arrested by the FBI, charged with infiltrating an anti-Castro organization in Miami and given sentences of varying lengths. In Cuba, no mention was made of them until June 2001: the date on which they were sentenced and the beginning of yet another movement of national liberation, one that – if what was said was to be believed – marked the latest epic crusade in the ongoing Revolution.
For sixteen years, ‘Los Cinco’ have been a constant presence in our lives. They are mentioned on the radio in the context of the most unpredictable subjects. Danny Glover comments on their case. Naive hands daub portraits of their malnourished faces on city walls, school murals and the doorways of job centres. High-ranking politicians weave the subject into their speeches. Medal-winning sportspeople offer them their gold, silver or bronze. Absolutely everything is dedicated to ‘Los Cinco’.
—
A couple of days later, near the Estadio Latinoamericano, Silvio Rodríguez staged one of his free concerts in a poorer neighbourhood. The Cuban Five were in attendance. At the end of the performance, one of them grabbed the microphone and shouted two slogans: ‘¡Viva Cuba libre!’ and ‘¡Seguimos en combate!’ Obsolete mottos, things no one says any more. Slogans that date back eighteen years, to a time before Los Cinco’s arrest. They are unaware of everything that has happened in the interim, a period which they embody. And they are precisely what separates them from their country. The slogans we are familiar with are slogans that honour them. When the agent in question stepped up to the microphone, it was one slogan shouting another slogan.
What tone should we adopt when the speech patterns of fearless heroism have faded? Those same speech patterns that were the backbone of our education. An incantation unfit for purpose, one that we long to shake off, yet one that conjures the affection of an old friend, that inspires nostalgia. With a flicker of dread, we are discovering that the good news is usurping our voice, because our whole vocabulary is based on confrontation, on warlike imagery. On 17 December, Cubans are celebrating a possibility, something that may come to pass, but we are also suffering the heartache of a tribe laying its dialect to rest.
II.
In early 2015, there are rumours circulating that Fidel Castro is dead, though for the time being, he is still alive – in fact he will not die until the end of this book. Fears over his state of health are fuelled by a specific detail. There have been no pictures – there will be none until early March – of the supreme leader of Cuba meeting with the three recently liberated agents.
6 January sees the birth of Gema, daughter of Gerardo Hernández, the leader of Red Avispa – a gift from the Three Wise Men of socialism. The details are curious: when Gerardo returned to Cuba, his wife, Adriana Pérez, was already eight months pregnant. The insemination – we found out later – was the result of a high-level political agreement involving influential US senators and the highest echelons of the Cuban general staff.
It is likely that Gema is as much the daughter of Gerardo and Adriana as she is of the weariness between warring enemies. A pregnancy that lasted nine months, and also spanned fifty-three years. I don’t know how Gema was delivered. But if it was one, it was a historic caesarean. Press coverage of her birth veered between political thriller, romance novel and socialist realism, penned by Le Carré, Corín Tellado and Boris Polevoy.
Gema showed us that when you mix Le Carré, Tellado and Polevoy, the result is Orwell lite, tropical Orwell. A news story in the worst press in the world before she was even considered a person. A baby who, given all the things that had befallen her, already seemed very old.
The little girl who was born when Castro was dying.
—
From the outset, the Obama administration authorized an increase in the limit of annual money transfers that Cuban-Americans could send to the island from $2,000 to $8,000. Obama also ended the requirement that those sending money have a special licence and expanded commercial sales and exports from the United States of certain goods and services, seeking to ‘empower the nascent Cuban private sector.’
Havana was quickly flooded with tourists. Hipsters from all over the world rushed to book their flights. All desperate to see the last retro corner of the Western world before it disappeared. With classic cars from the 1950s, no WhatsApp, no smartphones, a place where people did not stare at touchscreens as they headed to work, being too busy elbowing their way onto overcrowded buses.
If you were to tell a zealous revolutionary what these hipsters are thinking, that the old-world charm of Havana would never face down the onslaught of consumerism, the zealous revolutionary would think the hipsters were rabid capitalists, harbingers of evil who file their teeth and dream only of the moment when socialism – this bargain-basement version – disappears.
Meanwhile, on Calle Concordia in downtown Havana I stumbled across what I think must be the definitive image of the Revolution. On a street corner, two men sitting on upturned buckets, a board laid over their laps. Next to them, a plastic cup with a shot of rum. Their expressions utterly engrossed, so oblivious to the bustle all around them that you could only classify them as haughty. There is nothing about them that does not scream poverty, or even indigence.
Except that these men are not playing dominos. They’re not playing dice. They’re not playing brisca, or even poker. They’re not playing any of the games such men usually play. They are playing chess. One of them reaches out and moves his bishop.
—
Around 10 or 11 January, the rumours about Fidel Castro’s death begin to fade. What could be killing him?
The knowledge that this new era has no place for him, that there is no way for him to play a leading role? Exasperation at the fact that an agreement has been reached with the United States and that, however good it might seem, he represents the polar opposite? Or the reverse: the joy of someone who has finally achieved his goal and now feels that he can rest in peace?
On 12 January, somewhere in the world, Maradona shows off a letter that Fidel Castro has sent him, and the least important question is what is in the letter. If Fidel Castro wants to say something to Maradona, he doesn’t have to send a letter, this isn’t the nineteenth century. He could call him on his mobile. Talk to him on Skype (assuming that he has Skype, since no one else in Cuba does). Maradona is only the pretext. The true purpose of the letter is to shut people’s mouths. Or open them wider, who knows.
To his defenders, the fact that Castro is still alive is a political victory, to his bitter enemies it is a defeat. The embodiment of the ideological struggle between Castroist and anti-Castroist forces is a little abstract. Logically, death is neither capitalist nor socialist. Death is the most democratic of dictators.
—
On 21 January, the first round of diplomatic negotiations begins in Havana. People are worried that the talks will break down, that we will suddenly wake up and this whole thing will dissolve. Cuba as a Sleeping Beauty who, after half a century, is waiting for a kiss. Cuba, so chaste, so stately, a snooty communist lady, who, with a single kiss, could be turned back into a simpering teenager.
The neo-Stalinists are the nation’s father: they do not want their daughter to spread her legs. The pro-Yankees are the pimp: prepared to sell her on the first street corner. The ordinary people – the befuddled populace – are the meek, submissive mother who worries, who does not like to forbid, does not know whether it is better for her daughter to stay at home, date boys, to go out on the town, or to pack her bags and get the hell out. The government could be seen as the nation’s grandfather, who firmly believes the people still hang on his every word, when in fact they politely pretend to listen while he rambles on.
Obviously, there are other terms – age-old terms – to frame the subject: sovereignty, independence, capitalism, equality, revolution, fatherland. But politics is also a love affair.
Exactly one week later, on the anniversary of José Martí’s birth, Fidel Castro sends a message to the FEU, the University Student Federation: ‘I do not trust the policy of the United States,’ it reads, ‘nor have I exchanged a word with them, but this is not, in any way, a rejection of a peaceful solution to conflicts and the dangers of war.’
Everyone knows the message has come from him. Firstly because, until now, the only people who have lied about the state of his health are those in the media who want him to die. Every time the official press has affirmed that he is alive, he has been alive. Secondly, because the message – which is significantly longer – bears the unmistakable stamp of his recent ruminations. A hodgepodge of the same topics: climate change, the extinction of life on earth, the squandering of natural resources, the danger of a global holocaust, the evils of capitalism, the inequality between rich and poor.
And, in between these topics, he would jump from one subject to another, whatever came to mind: Mao Zedong, the Big Bang Theory, Carl Sagan, the Bilderberg Group, memories of the Sierra Madre, Guayasamín, Kennedy, Reagan, Savimbi, Martí, Erich Honecker, Ancient Greece, and so on, without pausing for breath, trying to link together things that seem – and indeed are – impossible to link. Gone – long gone – are the days of the unstoppable evangelist.
It is January 2015. And here we are, marathon runners with mud-spattered bodies, on the starting blocks of the hundred-metre sprint, trying to run it in ten seconds flat.
III.
This is the portrait of the ending of a cycle: who are we, and in what conditions will we reach the end of the long trek that was the Revolution? We had faith, and we have lost it; we have been maimed by impossible forces; we have run away, we have stood firm; we survived and we did not survive. What was this faith? Why did we lose it?
What do Cubans talk about when we talk about ourselves?
Throughout this book there is a parade of exiled sportspeople, major figures in conceptual art, internationalist physicians, celebrated musicians, and, from the underworld, dissident poets, emigrants who trekked through Central America, fugitives from the FBI, homeless people and suicides, black marketeers, schizoid balseros who fled the country aboard makeshift rafts, and the drunkards, cops and transvestites that teem in the riotous Havana nights.
The panorama created by these characters is as it is. I have not tried to unify them or set them apart, nor use them to prove some existing thesis, nor search in their stories for some new connecting thread, some registered trademark of what it means to be Cuban. This is the representation of a country.
This book also features the orthopaedist Rodolfo Navarro. Who deserves a special mention, because he is literally the last soldier of the Revolution.
—
In late afternoon on 16 April 2016, in his house in Puyo, the capital of Pastaza, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Navarro feels a tremor that, at first, simply arouses his curiosity. On the other side of the country, a powerful earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale has just claimed the first victims of the hundreds of fatalities and thousands of injured that will be reported all along the Pacific coast of Ecuador in the following days.
Navarro immediately volunteers to help. He is fifty years old and his moral code is guided by the altruistic and militant example of Che Guevara. He packs a rucksack, and when he presents himself at the Ministry of Health, he is firmly convinced that he is doing so because at some point the Revolution taught him it was the right thing to do. At the Ministry of Health he is told that he is not needed right now and that, in the event that he is, they will come and find him. Frustrated, Navarro logs onto Facebook and publishes a post demanding that his skills be called on somewhere.
Since 2013 and the reform of emigration policy that made it possible for Cubans to travel abroad without governmental restriction, Ecuador has become a kind of obsession. It is one of the few countries that does not require Cubans to obtain visas. Tens of thousands emigrate. Some to settle there, others with the intention of travelling through Central America to the United States.
In September 2014, having returned to Cuba after a medical mission to Venezuela, Navarro signs up for a programme called Ecuador saludable, which urged doctors to relocate, and in doing so became a living example of the Revolution fleeing the Revolution.
—
Medical internationalism, perhaps more than anything else, reflects the caricature to which Cuba has been reduced. The official media lionizes clinicians and cardiologists as the foot soldiers of socialist altruism, mere pawns moulded in the ideological furnace of the joyful everlasting solidarity factory that is the Revolution. They forget to mention that the doctors are paid a pittance for their contracts and are basically exploited. For their part, government opponents go so far as to equate these doctors with the totalitarian state, consumed by a fruitless attempt to discredit the programme, despite the fact that in more than two thousand years of philosophy, no one has yet come up with a convincing argument that discredits the pure and simple work done by doctors and nurses.
What these doctors are actually doing is the least important factor to both sides. It is an insoluble paradox for militants, but one that a non-militant might explain like this: Cuban doctors are saving lives in Africa and Latin America; meanwhile these doctors and the lives they save are used by a regime with no civil liberties as calling cards, as political ambassadors, as cheap labour, as a smokescreen to hide the accelerating collapse of the public health service in the country; but Cuban doctors are saving lives.
—
Every time a Cuban doctor is interviewed, whether because they have just returned to the fatherland, or because they have abandoned their mission, it is with the intention of getting them to say what people want to hear. People like me. As the opposition since they are not a defector. In the national political narrative, they are an outsider.
I was tempted to explore the idea of a doctor who no longer works for the government, yet continues to live according to the values that, as they acknowledge themselves, were taught to them by that same government; and how, simply because they are no longer working directly for them, the government does not hold them up as an example, or include a segment about them on the nightly news. And how, when it comes down to it, the Cuban government prizes subservience over the very values it purports to foster.
Solidarity is a sacrifice and consists of making other lives better by making your own worse. It is a logic that runs contrary to the logic of success, and even that of instinct, which is why it is in such short supply. In the end, Navarro managed to get to the city of Manta – the epitome of despair at that time – and to save the Ecuadorians who had been ravaged by the tragedy. He worked as a team leader in Tarqui, the area of Guayaquil worst hit by the earthquake, and in Los Sauces, a neighbourhood of fishermen. In the district of los Ángeles, he worked with the disabled, with bedbound patients, and cured a nine-year-old girl with an infection in her knee.
Later, the girl brought him a gift. Navarro was surprised, knowing that the girl had nothing more than the clothes she stood up in and he did not think it appropriate to accept her gift. She wore a pair of plastic flip-flops, a short-sleeved dress and, in her hair, a string of daisies. Her gift was a bird that had fallen from the sky. And the little girl specifically wanted the doctor to put it back in its nest because, when all is said and done, that is what doctors do. Whether earthquakes or broken bones, they put things back in their place.
BLACK PITCHER, WHITE SOCKS
Señora Luz María is expecting a number of parcels from up north. Her brother Humberto, a bald, heavy-set black guy with a bushy moustache and eyes like open wounds, goes back out to the parking lot to fetch something from his grey Hyundai. Both are expecting packages – some clothes, a food mixer, a DVD player – that a delivery boy will bring out in the next few minutes.
Terminal 2 at José Martí Airport in Havana is horrible, the crowds are teeming, the seats uncomfortable and there is little room to move. It is here that Cubans come and go from Miami. A cursory glance at the other terminals cannot help but make you think that cramped and claustrophobic Terminal 2 is some kind of implicit government payback.
The loudspeaker announces that the flight has landed. Luz María is waiting. Leaning against the trunk of the jeep, Humberto calmly smokes a cigarette and stares at the blue and yellow façade of the terminal building. He always comes here, always to receive packages. He has not seen his second oldest brother in more than a decade other than in photos or videos, and has not heard his voice except on the telephone.
But now, an adolescent – fifteen years old at most – is telling his father to stop. The father pays no heed and the irritated teenager tells him that Contreras is on the plane that has just landed. Humberto turns pale. He listens intently, but what he is hearing seems to come in slow motion. Then Humberto bursts into tears and takes off at a run. And when he gives the news to Luz María, she too cries and starts running.
‘Who?’ asks the father, bewildered.
‘Contreras,’ says the teenager, ‘the Yankees pitcher.’
It is 19 January 2013. Five days earlier, a new immigration law easing previous regulations imposed by Raúl Castro’s government came into effect; among the new provisions, high-level athletes are now allowed to return to Cuba as long as they have been out of the country for a minimum of eight years.
Since 1959, any Cuban athlete who emigrated and launched – or attempted to launch – a professional career with any foreign league or championship had been denied the right to return home. Since 1959, as fans, we were denied any and all information about sporting idols who had later decided to emigrate, and to an extent this is still the case. Although these days they are allowed to come back, we still know nothing about their careers: no statistics, no records of their failures or their triumphs. And what little information we do have is smuggled in.
Contreras is the first of hundreds of sportsmen to come home, and he is instantly mobbed by everyone at the airport.
—
Like so many others, Contreras was discovered by chance.
‘It was an ordinary game on an ordinary day in 1990,’ says Jesús Guerra, the scout who spotted him. ‘He was playing third base for Las Martinas, in a cooperative tournament.’
Guerra had been one of the great pitchers in the Series Nacionales. But he was also an outstanding coach, and a tenacious talent scout. He scooped up Pedro Luis Lazo when he had been written off as a baseball player, because he couldn’t throw a fastball; later, in Santiago de Chile, he rescued Norge Luis Vera after some wise-guy decided not to let him pitch.
Over the past twenty years, Jesús Guerra has singlehandedly been responsible for spotting the three best pitchers in Cuban baseball. Not only did he find them, he trained them, he coached them, he taught them to think on the pitcher’s mound. And that is no mean feat. Saying the three best Cuban pitchers is like saying the three best football players in Argentina, or the three greatest mountaineers in Nepal. There are few arts in Cuba more important than throwing balls to the home plate.
‘What was it about Contreras that caught your eye?’
‘His arm, obviously.’
‘What was it exactly?’
‘In the last inning, the batter hit a ground ball to Contreras, who fumbled it. The ball was about a metre away from him, and from his position on one knee, he threw the batter out at first. And I thought “Fuck, this kid’s got one hell of an arm.” So I went down to the field and asked to talk to him.’
‘What did you talk about?’
‘I suggested he sign up for the academy. Back then I was head of the Regional Pitching School in Pinar del Río.’
‘I don’t like pitching,’ Contreras said, ‘I like third base better.’
‘A third baseman can play for fifteen years, or for as long as he likes,’ Guerra said, ‘and with your arm, I think you could become one of the great Cuban ballplayers one day.’
He was thinking of Omar Linares, the most perfect machine, the most brilliant third baseman ever to play in the Series Nacionales.
‘So what did Contreras say?’
‘He said he’d have to talk to his papa. This was Sunday, and by Wednesday I was standing on his doorstep.’
He showed up, but there was no one there to welcome Coach Guerra, only women.
‘I had to go out to the fields, I found them digging up sweet potatoes.’
In the glare of the sun, from the abrupt gestures of the kid, and the shimmer of his dark skin, Coach Guerra figured he had found himself a cimarrón – a wild man. He had no choice but to hang around, work for a couple of hours and convince Florentino Contreras.
Eventually, he took his pupil away, and half a sack of sweet potatoes home. Contreras was twenty-one. Conventional wisdom would say he was too old to learn to pitch.
—
Right in the middle of the Special Period (1991–1992), José Ariel Contreras and Pedro Luis Lazo met at the academy.
For almost two years, they spent five days a week together. When they were on furlough, Coach Guerra would give them money to pay for transport. When they stayed at the academy, Guerra would walk for miles in search of food – a pig or maybe a chicken. And when he couldn’t find anything, he bought them candy, anything to ease their hunger. It was a bleak period. Even so, it had its positive side. Not because starvation strengthened the pitching arms of Contreras and Lazo, but because of the ordeals they overcame. Guerra believes that it made them mentally stronger.
‘To pitch in a World Series, in the Olympics, in a Classic, you need to be more than a pitcher,’ he says. ‘That’s where other things come into play.’
He doesn’t say which other things, but you can guess he means shrewdness, and cojones. Guerra’s protégés did all these things – pitched in a World Series, in the Olympics, in a Classic – and more.
Heads and tails. In 1995, both Lazo and Contreras were selected for the Cuban national squad for the first time, and won championships playing with Pinar del Río and the National team. Lanzo had an easy-going self-assurance while Contreras brimmed with an unpretentious shyness. Lanzo would brazenly smoke tobacco in public, whereas Contreras only ever smoked in the company of friends. Lanzo would joke on the benches, brag in the box, intimidate his opponents, barely stopping to catch his breath between pitches.
Contreras never opened his mouth, smiled rarely and awkwardly, and took much more time between pitches. He would watch, nod and if he had something to say, he did so in a whisper, as though making confession in church. Contreras managed through hypnotism what Lazo did with defiance. Contreras waged a war of attrition, Lazo delivered a knockout blow. Contreras slowly strangled while Lazo swiftly stabbed. Lazo’s weapon was a slider that curved like a scimitar, Contreras favoured a forkball that landed like a grenade.
In November 2012, Pedro Luis Lanzo was still proclaiming that the Cy Young Award was for others, that his country’s glory was enough for him. Meanwhile, Contreras had deserted the Cuban national team. Some months later, wearing the legendary number 52 shirt, he made his debut in the Major League.
During his last season in Cuba, before he left for good, Contreras won thirteen games, struck out one hundred and forty batters and allowed only two runs per nine innings pitched.
In the Baseball World Cup in Taipei in 2001, in the semi-final against Japan, he allowed only eleven hits and four walks. The following day, Cuba won the title, and during the ceremony to welcome the team home, Castro compared Contreras to Antonio Maceo and dubbed him the ‘Bronze Titan’.
—
You know you are nearing Las Martinas when you see the countless hairpin bends on the road, the triangular huts, the teams of oxen hauling timber. And especially by the facial features of the people. They seem possessed of a grave solemnity. Their faces are etched with deep lines and furrows that look as though they have been chiselled.
At the entrance to the village – after a mind-numbing two-and-half-hour drive along the Carretera Panamericana – stands an unpainted church in a style that might be described as gothic – or the basic notion most people have of gothic. Next to the church there is a bank, a café and two skinny dogs, a couple of people standing in their doorways, and farther off, a deserted baseball field.
A couple of blocks past the church, we turn right, leave the paved road and come to the Contreras family home. The ground is carpeted with a layer of dust so thick that people sink into it; they look as though their legs are cut off at the ankles. Coming from the city, you cannot help but wonder how anyone from here ended up pitching in Yankee Stadium. A throng of brothers, cousins, nephews and neighbours are waiting for the homecoming of the prodigal son. Also waiting for him is a lechona – a fifteen-pound suckling pig – transformed by the carver’s art to create perniles, masas, higado, rabo, cabeza, pork stew and a mountain of crispy chicharrones.
It is a modest house still. A television with a forty-inch screen, a tiled kitchen, furnishings that, for want of a better word, are comfortable, but something fills this space, binds it with an invisible cement that no millions, no dazzlingly successful son can cancel out. The conformity of humility.
‘This is where I’m from,’ Contreras will say, ‘this is my land, this is the house my father built. The only things I’m good at are pitching and planting sweet potatoes. When I can’t pitch, I come back here to plant sweet potatoes.’
Some five hundred metres further on are meadows, the land on which the house where he was born once stood, and the concrete foundations that are all that remains. ‘Huevo’, a local farmer and a friend of Contreras since childhood, takes the role of guide.
‘I was really excited to meet up with this ugly black guy again. ’Cos he’s one ugly black guy. A lot of people wouldn’t want to meet up with him, because they think he struts around like a millionaire.’
He points to the stunted ceiba tree where, as boys, the two of them played ball.
‘Maybe afterwards I’ll have to fess up that he’s a black guy turned white. But I don’t think so. Back when he was on the Cuban national team and he was already famous, he still came here, he was still happy to ride a horse or drive a cart, no problem.’
He nods towards the well where Contreras went to fetch water, again and again, every day of his childhood. These days, it is just a black hole surrounded by bricks and weeds, half-covered by a sheet of metal.
—
It is now three in the afternoon on 30 January. Contreras will not make an appearance before six o’clock. Eleven tumultuous days have passed since his arrival. After landing in Havana, he climbed into a grey Hyundai with Humberto and Luz Maria and headed straight for the Hospital Salvador Allende, some ten kilometres from the airport.
In the National Institute of Angiology, a dilapidated four-storey building, Contreras’s mother Modesta Camejo, now seventy-seven, is having surgery. Her left leg is severely necrotic and needs to be amputated before the toxins spread to the rest of her body. The operation is a success. And, all things considered, Contreras is happy.
Within forty-eight hours, the patient is discharged, but this will not be an ordinary convalescence. The family is torn between these conflicting circumstances: José Ariel’s homecoming and Modesta’s ill health. When they leave the hospital, they do not head to Las Martinas, but to Guanabo. They rent three villas overlooking El Megano, one of the most popular beaches east of Havana, where they stay for a week.
Contreras’s sister María, a skinny, charming black woman with a shaven head, once drank sixty-four beers in a single night. Contreras, on the other hand, spends his time training. He runs on the beach, gives interviews to NBC, signs autographs for local kids, and throws between fifty and seventy pitches every other day, while coach Guerra watches how he swings his arm, how he delivers the pitch. All this comes after a severe injury in June 2012 in which he tore the tendon in his right elbow and was benched by the Philadelphia Phillies for the remainder of the season.
And so it is only today, eleven days after coming back, after visiting the Parque Central in Havana and the major towns in Pinar del Río, after going out to a night café with Lazo, that Contreras arrives home.
The grey Hyundai rounds the corner. The neighbours come from their houses, they watch from their doorways, they gather by the roadside, in a tumult of whoops and tears of happiness.
—
In 2010, the government granted Modesta Camejo permission to travel to the United States for one or two months every year and return to Cuba. During one of those trips, the problems with her circulation worsened.
When Modesta landed in Philadelphia, Contreras took her to the Phillies’ stadium. Suddenly, this woman who had never set foot outside her little town found herself sitting on the bleachers in Citizens Bank Park. She had never been to Capitán San Luis stadium or to the Latinoamericano because Pinar del Río and Havana were a long way from where she lived; now, in a twinkling, she was at the home of the MLB champions, a stadium that could hold more than the entire population of Las Martinas.
As a closer, Contreras played only two games that week. He managed a 97-mph cutter, brought his earned run average down to 0.93, and Modesta burst into tears. Not because of her son’s achievements, which she did not understand, but because it was not she who should be sitting in the bleachers, but his father, Florentino Contreras. An upstanding man, a former baseball player who, in 2002, when rumours began to spread that Contreras had defected, sat out on the stoop of his house and declared that he refused to believe it, that he would wait until the Cuban team came home and his son did not come round the corner. And he waited.
‘I left because I was ambitious,’ Contreras explains, ‘I wanted to prove myself in Major League Baseball, I wanted to try. It came at a cost, but I wanted to prove myself.’
‘The old man locked himself in his room and refused to come out,’ says Francisco, Florentino’s son by his first marriage. ‘He was a communist, a militant, he was deeply committed.’
Francisco cries almost without shedding a tear, he looks like a gnarled branch.
Florentino kept to his bed for days. Eventually he got up and told anyone who would listen to let Contreras know that, whatever happened, he would always be his son.
Francisco explains:
‘They talked on the phone a couple of times, but a little while later, the old man died.’
‘How much later?’
‘About two years, maybe.’
‘In 2004?’
‘Yes, in 2004.’
‘What did he die of?’
‘An obstructed bowel.’
‘Not a broken heart?’
Francisco says nothing. Then he shakes his head, a vehement ‘no’, and says that the old man had been ill for some time. But in his eyes, a flicker of doubt makes it clear that he, and everyone else, has considered the idea.
—
No one was expecting his defection, not even those closest to him. The first person to find out was his sister, Francisca, the eldest of the family, who lives in La Víbora in Havana.
‘There was a cyclone in Cuba,’ she says, ‘and I thought they were phoning to check in on us. But no. I was the one who had to tell papá.’
‘What did Florentino say?’
‘He said why didn’t he have the balls to tell me himself. But we never mention that. People said he was influenced by Miguelito Valdés. That’s a lie. José himself told me that when he showed up at the meeting point and saw Miguelito, he thought he had been ratted out.’
Miguel Valdés was head coach of the Cuban national team, a distinguished man with more than thirty years’ experience. People speculated – not unreasonably – that Valdés had been the brains behind the defection, and that it was he who had managed to persuade Contreras.
‘I was in Las Tunas coaching the provincial team when I heard the news on the television,’ says Guerra. ‘There had never been a news flash in Cuba about an athlete defecting. They were talking about Contreras like has was a hero who had died on the battlefield. I couldn’t listen. I stormed out of my room and I fought with everything.’
‘What do you mean “everything”?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
It would take years before the two men were in touch again. In fact, Guerra let it be known that if Contreras ever did come back one day, he could come looking for him in the cemetery in Guane, that he’d be waiting.
Initially, they talked about technical issues; Contreras would ask Guerra for advice, but perhaps, beyond his questions about using a forkball in the Major Leagues, he was simply looking for a little paternal affection. With Lazo, on the other hand, there was never a time when the two were not in touch.
‘After I left,’ says Contreras, ‘I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to cause him any trouble, but he sent me his phone number and told me I had to call him. I kept asking for advice. He would watch the games and talk to me about arm-angles, technical stuff. And now, since I’ve been back, he’s come to find me, to see me.’
When Lazo inflicted humiliating defeats on Venezuela and the Dominican Republic during the first World Baseball Classic, Contreras, who was in a bar in Arizona, lept up onto his table.
‘I shouted and screamed, how could I not?’
Obviously, the fact that they held one or other role was pure chance.
—
The winter of 2002 was bitter and brutal. Contreras holed up in a hotel in Managua while he waited for confirmation that he was a free agent in the Major League. A Nicaraguan journalist who interviewed him during his stay said he had never seen anyone with such sad eyes, and ran the piece with a headline worthy of Darío: ‘A MELANCHOLY MILLIONAIRE.’ Even so, the stay had its moments of grace. The great arch-rivals of MLB – the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox – were fighting to the death to sign him up.
Theo Epstein, general manager of the Red Sox, flew to Nicaragua and rented out every room in the hotel where Contreras was staying so that none of the rival teams could talk to Contreras or to Jaime Torre, the legendary agent of Cuban baseball players who emigrate to the United States. Contreras signed a four-year contract with the Yankees for $32 million, an exorbitant sum for a man who had never pitched a ball professionally, who was not a guaranteed success, who had not even proved himself in the Minor Leagues.
