Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [13]
“Thanks. And listen, Tommy, tell the boys to check under the hood before they move it. There might be a bomb.”
Chapter 3
ONCE, WHEN MEN were young and home was Cuba, the lector sat in a place of honor above the long rows of wooden benches. He did not look at the artisans or they, gracefully building rich men’s toys with flashing fingers, pungent leaf and wicked blade, at him.
In the mornings the lector exhausted the newspapers. Slowly, clearly, loud enough for the most junior apprentice to hear him, the lector would read all the local newspapers: the news, the editorials, the sports, the comics. In four hours of spoken lullaby each tabaquero would make one hundred cigars.
The long hot afternoons were a more contemplative time. The lector read novels of history and romance in the afternoons. Another four hours, another one hundred cigars.
The lectores were gone now, obsolete as lamplighters, vanquished by radio. In Miami today the tabaquero radios play loudly: saucy Latin music, mournful laments for a lost homeland, blatant come-ons to a consumer society. In the afternoons, soap operas.
The hands that caress the velvet leaf are the same. They are still quick, still supple, as loving as ever. It is the ears of the tabaqueros that are not what they once were. They have survived the lectores, but they will not survive the century. And there are none to follow them, not in Miami. Young Cubans in Miami drive trucks, teach school, run banks, smuggle dope. They do not roll cigars.
It is the old men who come to work in Miami’s storefront cigar factories, old men steeped in tradition, patience and pride. Three old men came to work most mornings at the Matanzas cigar factory in a quiet side street near the Orange Bowl. For a long time it had been four, until Pepín died. Now it was only three. Elberto could have come if he had wanted to, Elberto whose cunning hands had made cigars for princes and presidents in Cuba. But Elberto was lazy. He had always been lazy. Cabrón. Now he played dominoes day and night, useless, like an old woman. Elberto liked to tease his friends who still went to work every morning.
“Fools,” he would cry as he passed the bench where they waited for the bus. “You need not work. Let your Tío Sam pay for your frijoles. You have worked long enough. Don’t you know where they pay Social Security? Come, I will show you.”
Fools? It was Elberto who was the fool, thought Jesús. One day he would learn how important it was to make cigars at the Matanzas factory. One day he would watch with envy while all of Little Havana crowded around the Matanzas tabaqueros to shake their hands and slap their backs. Then Elberto would see who had been the fool.
It was Jesús who opened the rickety front door each morning, who made the cafecitos and laid out the savory tobacco leaves to be worked. The leaves came from the Dominican Republic now, and the wrapper from Cameroon, but the tobacco had been grown from seeds smuggled out of Cuba. It was better than ever, better even than the tobacco other Cuban exiles now grew in Honduras and the Canary Islands. Was it as good as Cuban tobacco? Ni hablar. Of course it was better. Jesús had never met a Communist who could grow tobacco, much less roll a good cigar.
It was Jesús who fed the chickens in the small plot of green behind the shop and who turned on the radio that was the pallid North American substitute for the lector. Pedro and Raúl teased Jesús that he must do all the housekeeping work because he was the baby of the shop. Jesús knew they expected him to do all the work because he was a natural leader, and he appreciated that. Jesús was seventy-four.
It was Jesús, too, who emptied the ashtray and dusted and switched on the air-conditioning in the small private office at the rear of the shop. The office was soundproofed, paneled richly in wood. It held a modern desk and a swivel chair and a telephone with many buttons. It looked a century newer than the rest of the shop, and it was the real reason the three old men came each morning to make cigars.