Learning to Die in Miami Read online

  ALSO BY CARLOS EIRE

  Waiting for Snow in Havana

  Free Press

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 2010 by Carlos Eire

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Free Press trade paperback edition June 2011

  FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Book design by Ellen R. Sasahara

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

  Eire, Carlos M. N.

  Learning to die in Miami: confessions of a refugee boy / Carlos Eire.

  p. cm.

  Continues: Waiting for snow in Havana / Carlos Eire.

  New York: Free Press, © 2003

  1. Eire, Carlos M. N.—Childhood and youth. 2. Cuban Americans—Biography 3. Refugee children—Florida—Miami—Biography. 4. Miami (Fla.)—Biography. I. Eire, Carlos M. N. Waiting for snow in Havana. II. Title.

  E184.C97E36 2010

  305.8968’72910759381—dc22

  [B] 2009052286

  ISBN 978-1-4391-8190-4

  ISBN 978-1-4391-8191-1 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-4391-8192-8 (ebook)

  To the Infant Jesus of Prague,

  fellow exile,

  and to all who opened their arms

  to the Lost Boys and Girls

  from Castrolandia:

  eternal thanks

  Death is a dialogue between

  The spirit and the dust.

  “Dissolve,” says Death. The Spirit, “Sir,

  I have another trust.”

  Death doubts it, argues from the ground.

  The Spirit turns away,

  Just laying off, for evidence,

  An overcoat of clay.

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  Preamble

  Fearing that we’d be enslaved,

  our parents sent us away, so many of us,

  to a land across the turquoise sea.

  Alone, all alone, we kids. No mom, no dad,

  no kin on the alien shore, beyond the horizon;

  willing, clueless fugitives.

  Our exodus came to be known as the Pedro Pan airlift.

  Operation Peter Pan in English.

  A ridiculous name for something

  so unlike a fairy tale.

  Ferried to Anti-Neverland,

  we lost our childhood in a blinding flash,

  forever.

  We dribbled out little by little, between 1960 and 1962,

  steadily, inexorably,

  like drops of blood from a wound that wouldn’t heal,

  unnoticed.

  Fourteen thousand of us, boys and girls

  —a Children’s Crusade—

  exiled, orphaned, for what?

  Freedom.

  For us who flew away, our families, and our captive brethren

  freedom is no abstraction.

  It’s as real as the marrow in our bones,

  or the words on this page, or whatever you ate today,

  and as crucial as breathing.

  Everything in this narrative was preordained,

  including our inability to predict our fate.

  Most of us still marvel at our peculiar niche in history,

  as invisible footnotes.

  Our would-be overlords marvel, too, as they choke on their bile.

  Poor devils.

  It irks them to know that we escaped,

  and they so envy our luminous scars

  and our ceaseless resurrection.

  Content

  Preamble

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Beyond Number

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  One

  Having just died, I shouldn’t be starting my afterlife with a chicken sandwich, no matter what, especially one served up by nuns.

  Is it a bad omen, this sandwich? Perhaps. But maybe it’s a good one too.

  How can I know?

  I have no way of discerning good from bad omens, much less of intuiting that all auguries are really an extension of our own fears. I don’t know yet, at this point in life, that misfortunes can prove to be gifts from on high, sometimes the greatest gifts of all, or that ironic twists of fate are sure signs of divine providence. A child of eleven has no way of knowing that, or of believing it. And that’s how old I am.

  It’s late at night, and I’ve just arrived at the camp for airlifted Cuban children in deepest, darkest South Florida. Earlier today, I left behind my parents, my entire family, all of my possessions, and my native land, and at this moment I don’t really know whether I’ll see any of them ever again.

  In other words, I’ve just died. I’ve passed through the burning silence that strips you bare of everything you’ve ever been. And so have the other two boys sharing the table with me: Luis Del Riego Martinez, age seven, and his little brother Roberto, age six.

  The sandwich I’ve been served is very white. It’s on that kind of bread that comes in square slices and is all spongy and tasteless, with a thin rubbery crust. American bread. Pan Americano. The chicken is almost as colorless as the bread, and so is the mayonnaise that oozes out, cautiously. It’s been cut down the middle, diagonally, and the square has been turned into two triangles. It reminds me of the sandwiches served at my first communion reception, at the Havana Yacht Club, back when the world was still spinning in the right direction. Except those had ham salad inside, not sliced-up chicken, which gave you a hint of pink. I stare at it, this white thing, these symmetrical triangles, there, on the flimsy white paper plate, which is round, on a square table that’s covered by a white tablecloth. It’s so orderly, so controlled, so geometrical, so colorless, this plate of food. Two triangles that form a square, inside a circle, laid out on a larger square. It’s the perfect disguise for the very messy and painful process that made this meal possible. Chickens aren’t square or triangular. Chickens don’t just lay themselves down on bread, in neat thin slices. Where are the feathers? Where are the feet, or the beak, or the blood and offal? Who dismembered this lumpy, clucking creature and turned it into a geometry lesson?

  The plate has scalloped edges that curve upward slightly. The curving indentations on the rim are perfect, having been stamped by a machine, a contraption that is surely a masterpiece of modern engineering, made possible only by very precise computations and the m
anipulation of Euclidean geometry.

  Bright fluorescent bulbs flood the room with a bluish yellow light that makes everyone look slightly jaundiced or just plain ugly. The bulbs are long and tubular: perfect circles stretched out, in which mercury vapor atoms go berserk. The fixture into which these tubes are inserted—as two parallel lines that could stretch to infinity—is rectangular. The other two boys look like zombies. The nuns look very kindly and very stern all at once, and very wrinkled, save for their habits and veils, which are the very definition of order, neatness, and control expressed in cloth.

  “Pan Americano, Pan American: how hilarious, this double meaning,” I say to myself, thinking of the bread on my plate and one of the two airlines that link Cuba and the United States. I’ve just flown on the other one, KLM, Royal Dutch Airlines.

  This is only one of the many non sequiturs that are racing through my mind as I adjust to my death and rebirth, and prepare for torture.

  Having just flown for the first time, I have airplanes on my mind. Aircraft are all about geometry and symmetry too, and about using exact calculations to transcend our limitations. Airplanes are all about leaving messes behind too, and forgetting they exist. I meditate briefly on the fact that if it were up to me to invent airplanes, there wouldn’t ever be any, given my loathing of exact calculations and my inborn distrust of the laws of nature. No airplanes, no way, if it were all up to me. No triangular chicken sandwiches either.

  “Ay, pero esto es pollo,” I yell inside my head, very, very loudly. Oh, but this is chicken.

  Talk about a rough landing.

  This chicken meal offends me, greatly, and scares the hell out of me. My parents have always been extremely indulgent when it came to my food preferences. I’ve spent my entire childhood shielded from chicken flesh, which, as every well-educated person knows, is not much different from that of reptiles. Even the not-so-well educated know this, I suspect. After all, is there anyone on earth who hasn’t noticed that bird feet are thoroughly reptilian? And how is the taste of reptile meat described by those who have sunk their teeth into frogs, snakes, alligators, and iguanas?

  “Tastes just like chicken.”

  Big problem, this likeness between avian and reptile flesh: It’s all part of the evolution that made us humans what we are—so different from birds and snakes, and yet so much like them. Even as a small child, the whole deal bothered me to no end: Eat or be eaten, and beware of serpents in paradise.

  Somehow, I know of this affinity between fowl, reptiles, and our inner rottenness. I know it instinctively. It was the very first thing I saw when I opened my third eye, and it blew me away, at a very early age, in a stinking meat market where you chose which creature would be slaughtered for you, right there, as you looked on. No me jodas, I said to myself, as the butcher plucked the feathers from a freshly decapitated and still bleeding chicken. You’ve got to be kidding. Whack, whack. There go the feet too. Ay. What kind of cruel cosmic hoax is this?

  Exactly the same reaction I had to the story of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and the goddamned fruit, when I first heard it. No me jodas.

  Being too young to attend school, where one is taught to discern between right and wrong, I had not yet learned that such words—used so freely by my fellow countrymen—could land you in hell for eternity. So I parroted my fellow Cubans with abandon, until I got to school a year or two later and the Christian Brothers set me straight.

  Learning of the connection between words and damnation would open my third eye even wider, allowing me to reckon at an early age that most of the big things in life don’t really make much sense and that seemingly stupid questions might turn out to be the most significant.

  I often wonder, still, so many years later: Do chickens and snakes know that they are related to each other? Do they ever have a sense of déjà vu when they cross paths, or recognize a familiar glimmer in each other’s eyes? Do chickens laugh at us, knowing that a cousin of theirs caused us to be exiled from paradise?

  Big problem, then, my being fed a chicken sandwich by the nuns that evening. It’s a harbinger of things to come, a foretaste of other unsavory dishes on my horizon. I haven’t had a bite to eat since breakfast, however, and I know that there’s no longer anyone to pamper me or shield me from reptile meat. I’m hungrier and more stunned than I’ve ever been in my whole life, and I’m eager to be as flexible as a newly dead and resurrected eleven-year-old boy can be.

  No parents, no choice, I tell myself.

  Damn it. This chicken sandwich is just as awful as I expected. Every cell in my brain is screaming in revolt, at full volume. But I gobble it up as the nuns stare at me, silently, with their eagle eyes, so exquisitely adapted to perceiving and preying upon the slightest hint of disobedience, a mile away. I know enough about nuns to suspect that if I spurn the damned thing, or leave a crumb or two behind, I might get whacked or be forced to write I shall never again refuse a chicken sandwich a thousand times on the blackboard. Maybe even in English, rather than Spanish.

  I try not to gag, but I do, a couple of times. I can’t help it. I struggle to disguise the gagging as hiccups. You never know what a nun might do to you if you gag on her sandwich.

  I don’t realize it, but these fake hiccups are my very first step toward becoming an American, my first successful attempt at being someone other than myself. And little do I suspect that six years later, in high school, when I go on my first date, I’ll go into a hiccuping fit that will last longer than a week. Who knows what doctors Freud and Jung or any of their disciples would have to say about that, or about the fact that I ended up marrying and divorcing that girl?

  I don’t really want to know.

  Outside, the night air is perfectly calm, but the din from the insects is deafening. Maybe the frogs are chiming in too, and the alligators, and freakish loudmouthed lizards and snakes that I’ve never run into before. I’ve never heard such a racket. The earth hums so loudly that I feel the vibrations on my skin. I imagine a squadron of flying saucers hovering nearby. That would be so great. But there aren’t any spacecraft. I’m old enough to know that all accounts about flying saucers and interstellar travel are nothing but fairy tales. And I’m also old enough to know that there are no aliens here, save for ourselves.

  We’re perched on the edge of the Everglades, about an hour’s drive south of Miami, in Florida City, the southernmost town on the U.S. mainland, right next to Homestead Air Force Base. The next town down Dixie Highway, the only road that leads out of town, is Key Largo in the Florida Keys. I don’t know this, of course. I think I’m in Miami. There’s a whole lot I don’t know, including what awaits me right after I finish this gag-a-thon of a chicken meal.

  The three of us who’ve arrived at that camp on the night of the sixth of April, 1962, have just been thrown onto a well-oiled conveyor belt that receives pampered Cuban children every few days, sorts them out, and ships them all over the United States, preferably as far from Florida as possible. Back in Cuba our parents had told us that we’d be sent to great boarding schools, on scholarships, or be taken in by wealthy American families.

  Our parents have no clue either. Not one of us airlifted kids would end up at Phillips Exeter, Groton, or Choate Rosemary Hall.

  I imagine my parents are calm, even happy. After all, they’ve been so desperate to catapult us off the island, for our own protection. It doesn’t occur to me that they might be weeping and wailing, gnashing their teeth, and rending their garments. Many years later, after I’ve had children of my own, I’ll look back on this moment and think about the gloom that must have descended on them whenever they walked past my empty bedroom, or what awful things they imagined whenever they gave any thought to tomorrow, or the next day, and the day after that. But that will be years later.

  On this night, I’m still a kid, and I still believe what my parents have told me.

  Everything will be all right. No te preocupes. Don’t worry.

  I try not to think about the fact that
my brother Tony and I were separated at the airport, as soon as we cleared the immigration desk, and that he’s been whisked away to a different camp. No one has yet explained why he was taken away in one van and I in another. In a little while I’ll find out that he’s gone to the camp for teenage boys, and that I’ve ended up at the one for girls and preteen boys. No one has to explain the logic behind this arrangement to me. I understand it instinctively. It’s 1962, after all, and everyone knows that girls need to be shielded from pubescent boys and vice versa. I remember being told at some point that this is one of the ten commandments: Thou shalt not bring those with raging hormones unto temptation.

  I’m still convinced at this point that the first commandment is “Thou shalt not utter filthy words,” and that the second is “Thou shalt not have any dirty thoughts.” I’d already had several years of Catholic schooling, after all, and learned all there was to learn about sin.

  We finish our hellish sandwiches, and I feel extra virtuous. I’ve managed not to vomit, and I’ve even fooled these nuns into thinking that I enjoyed their meal. I think of my mom and dad and how proud and amazed they’d be if they knew that I’d just eaten an entire chicken sandwich and kept it down.

  “Muchísimas gracias,” I say to the nuns as I leave their well-lit torture chamber. Politeness was always the most important virtue in my household, back in benighted Havana.

  I’m taken to my sleeping quarters, and the other two boys to theirs. The camp is a cluster of tiny houses, dotted with a handful of larger buildings including a large one made of steel, which is the mess hall, as I’ll find out soon enough. I’ll also discover that this camp once served as housing for the families of married airmen from Homestead Air Force Base. I’ll also find out quickly that the prefabricated houses are ridiculously small, and that all of them are managed by Cuban couples who live there with their own children and with those of us who keep arriving and leaving in a steady stream, like water through a garden hose.

  I’ll find out that boys and girls are carefully segregated there, too, which means that brothers and sisters go to different homes.