When We Left Cuba(6)
“In the beginning,” I answer, my tone considerably cooler.
Dwyer smiles, the effort unnatural on a face that looks as though it has little use for charming lines creeping in the creases and folds of his skin.
“I can do inscrutable with the best of them, Miss Perez, but you requested this meeting, so if you’re going to convince me this is worth my time, you’d better start now.”
In Cuba, people are suffering, dying, while here stands a man in a tuxedo idly plotting a coup between drags of his cigarette. That he’s likely enjoying it adds insult to injury.
“You wouldn’t be meeting with me if you weren’t a little desperate.” My confidence grows a bit with each word falling from my lips. “You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t looking for creative ways to get close to Fidel,” I add. “If he hadn’t rebuffed any and all diplomatic overtures you’ve already made. I’m the one risking everything—my reputation, my family’s, my life—so please explain to me how I need you more than you need me. I could easily find a rich man to slide a ring on my finger and buy me a big mansion while the world around me burns, but you’re the one with communism breathing down your neck, whose head will roll if Latin America falls. You have a potential powder keg sitting ninety miles away from America’s shores. You need Cuba. And you need me. Let’s not insult each other’s intelligence by pretending otherwise.”
He inclines his head in a mock salute amid a cloud of smoke. “Eduardo said you were more than just another pretty face.”
Eduardo Diaz, the son of one of my father’s friends, is the man who orchestrated this little meeting, one of the many who have helped my family acclimate to life in the United States.
Dwyer takes another drag on his cigarette. “Would you like to start over, then? Why do you think you can get close to Castro?”
“Because he is a man.”
Is there really need to say more? You don’t garner five marriage proposals without learning a thing or two about the management of men.
“Have you met him before? Has he proposed to you, too?”
It seems my reputation once again precedes itself.
“No, he’s never had the pleasure. I’ve met Guevara a handful of times, though.”
“And Guevara trusts you?”
I allow myself one very unladylike snort. “Hardly. I doubt he very much cares one way or the other, but isn’t that the point? I’m the girl they know from the society pages. One of the infamous sugar queens they so despise yet cannot resist. No one considers me a threat, and given the size of their egos, their dislike of my family, and the cachet of my last name, the idea of sticking it to my father will be eminently persuasive. Besides . . .”
My voice trails off, but I don’t need to finish the thought. Revolutionaries, tyrants, it doesn’t matter. They are, at their hearts, men, driven by things other than their intellect.
Dwyer’s gaze rakes over my appearance once more, examining the curves on display, taking in the signs that my circumstances have been reduced: the dress a blush removed from fashion, the ill-fitting shoes, the garish glint of the necklace around my neck.
For all my posturing, I need this, too, and he knows it.
“So how do you propose to get to him? In Cuba?”
He dangles it in front of me like a treat before a child. What wouldn’t I give to return home to the only place I have ever felt as though I belonged? To return to my friends, my extended family, my people, to stop this endless waiting?
“Perhaps,” I answer. “Or when he comes to the United States for a diplomatic visit.”
Castro was invited to the United States last April, three months after he took power. To his credit, President Eisenhower didn’t receive him, but Fidel did meet with Vice President Nixon. Judging by the man standing before me, their meeting did not go well.
“Castro isn’t a reckless man. Not with his life, at least. It won’t be easy to get close to him, even with your considerable charms,” Dwyer cautions.
“I don’t need it to be easy. I only need a chance.”
“And if you don’t succeed? If his guards stop you, they could kill you. They likely will. There are some places where your last name isn’t going to protect you. Are you prepared for that?”
“If I don’t succeed, then they kill me. I assure you, I’m aware of the stakes. I wouldn’t volunteer for this if I wasn’t.”
“Didn’t take you for an idealist.”
He says “idealist” like it’s a vulgar word.
“I’m not one.”
“Your brother—”
“I don’t talk about my brother. You don’t get that.”
Alejandro was the first to speak out when he began to see the cracks in the life we lived in Cuba before the revolution. His outrage over our family’s wealth and position in contrast to the suffering of those around us spilled out at the dinner table. Eventually, he joined the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria, one of the student groups organizing at the University of Havana, and became involved with the resistance to then Cuban president Fulgencio Batista, participating in an attack on the Presidential Palace that ultimately led to our father disowning him. While most viewed Batista through a negative lens, our father chose friendship as a necessarily evil.