Topaz - Leon Uris [41]
This was André’s first return to Cuba in several months. The drive into the city showed, without words, that things had gotten still worse.
The row of factories, beginning with the Goodrich and International Harvester plants, was all but defunct.
The stadium was once again turned into a concentration camp, crammed with real or imaginary enemies rounded up after the Bay of Pigs.
André left Alain Adam at the Chancellery, taking an Embassy car by himself to let his professional eye appraise Havana.
The “beat” was gone.
Havana! The city of romance, rhythm, rum, roulette!
The “beat” was gone.
Gone were the shrill voices of the bookies in their lottery stalls where any Cuban worth his salt would bet on the next pitch or at the cockfight or at the jai-alai frontons.
That nervous movement of the Habanero taking his spoon-sized cup of potent sweet coffee in a single quick sip twenty times a day at the little open stands.
The beat of barter at the cheap brothels set in near the docks waiting for the French, American, and Italian fleets to unload their cargoes of swaggering sailors. This, too, was gone.
Gone were the clicking Cuban heels and swaying bottoms and the lust-filled eyes of the Habaneros, who seemed to have no other occupation but watching women’s backsides.
And the beat of the promenaders who aired themselves along the Malecón sea front all dressed in bleached white.
Gone were the shiploads of tourists seeking sin, making off for Sloppy Joe’s, where a dozen bartenders played out magnificent drama in the fine art of mixing drinks.
And El Floridita, where those in the know waited to ogle at the bearded pundit of American literature. El Florida, which acquitted itself nobly in its sacred mission of saving the daiquiri formula during American prohibition. And, during prohibition, the luxury yachts came to avail themselves of the pleasures of the Sodom of the Western Hemisphere.
Gone now were the delights of the lady tourists in that place where they could be improper. The pornographic movie houses and human male stud shows.
Diminished were the world’s greatest night club, the Tropicana, and the splendid restaurants, the Monseigneur and the Crystal Palace and the rest where justice was done to the delectable Morro crab with mayonnaise made before one’s eyes at tableside.
All these things that had made Havana a center of sin and gave her her “beat” were gone.
And in their place the arcaded streets were patrolled by angry, bearded, bereted revolutionaries.
The whores had all been rounded up and interned in the once elegant Hotel Nacional to be reenlightened to live as productive citizens of the new society. They were turned loose as drivers, and soon the highways and roads were littered with the wreckage of trucks that had died of abuse.
Smart shops once bulging with alligator and tobacco and liquors and other national products that lined the Paseo de Martí on Prado Boulevard were either seedy, empty or shuttered.
The nation’s Capitol building, an edifice built after the Capitol in Washington of marble and rare woods and gilded bronze, had degenerated into a grotesque house of barter.
Departing refugees were forced to turn in almost every personal possession. These were dumped, sorted, and sold in the foyers, halls, and galleries of Cuba’s Capitol. Baby shoes, eyeglasses, trousers, brassieres, sandals, Panama hats, jewelry, all stacked in marble corridors like the warehouses of Auschwitz.
André drove through the harbor tunnel to the Morro Castle and La Cabaña Fort. Thousands of Cubans stood in tragic silence waiting for a glimpse of a relative imprisoned in the former national shrines. The dungeons of Morro Castle were once again crammed. And thousands were shoved into the dry moats of La Cabaña, the black hole of the universe. They were left to die in the blazing sun with almost no water or sanitation, and they fought like rats for scraps thrown down to them by the militia.
Old people were in these moats. Old people