Before Fidel: The Cuba I Remember

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER FIVE On Sunday evenings Eduardo Chibás, the firebrand politician who had founded the Partido Ortodoxo (Orthodox Party) and had run as a protest presidential candidate in the 1948 elections, spoke on the radio, although it was actually shrieking and ranting and raving, condemning political corruption and government inefficiency and pointing out the many ills afflicting the country and ascribing them all to the negligence, malfeasance, cupidity and stupidity of Auténtico politicians and, specifically , to the Prío administration. I loved listening to his tirades because he would say in public what many said in private but no one else would broadcast or print, and because there was daring in his philippics and idealism in his jeremiads, and because he angered those who disagreed with him, and because in the middle of the profligacy, dissolution, turpitude and dishonesty that infected Cuban politics, he had managed to remain honest and forthright, and because his enemies called him el loco, the crazy one, because there was nothing else they could accuse him of, and because he had bolted the Auténtico organization and launched a new party that sought to return to the ideas and principles that had inspired the radical students and middle-class dissenters of the 1930s, and because he spoke with a lisp and couldn’t pronounce the erre, the Spanish double r. I went to work in September—at sixteen. I reported to the bank’s branch on Zulueta Street, starting with a salary of fifty pesos a month for the initial six-month probationary period, which was the same as fifty American dollars since the Cuban peso was pegged to the dollar and both circulated freely throughout the island, and this initial salary was to be raised to ninety-five pesos when I became a permanent employee. This was indeed a good salary for a young, ignorant kid, way above the 65 average wage brought by any similar job thanks to the muscle of the bank employees’ labor union, which in militancy and proneness to violence was the closest thing to the American Teamsters organized Cuban labor had to offer. The bank quickly taught me how the world really worked, how one went about changing it, what would happen when you tried to change it, and what would happen when you didn’t. Six months into the job my position became permanent, which, given the legislation of the time and the power of the union, meant that the only way to get myself fired was by being caught stealing. After the same six months I was made union shop steward because no one else among the eight unionized employees in the office wanted the job, and I had no idea what that meant other than it was important, and that I would be in charge of union matters, leading my coworkers and speaking for them, and that made me feel grown up, and for the first time I was pulled in by the seductive appeal of power, and as a river follows its natural course, the rebel in me found another cause. We like to pretend our actions and opinions come in the wake of some mental process or result from some form of understanding, but I am convinced they respond to forces and motivations of which we have only the vaguest awareness. We feel what we feel because that’s the way we feel, and explanations follow in accordance with our individual preferences, schooling, creativity, and the nature of the time; and as I joined the union and became active in its work, I immediately felt driven to oppose its corrupt leadership. It was evident its leadership was corrupt because otherwise it couldn’t be its leadership and enjoy the privileges and accoutrements of power in a society as base as ours and with a political system as knavish as the one we had. These people, I soon concluded in justifying my opinion, didn’t match, or even come close to, what union leaders should be, not that I had any notion of what that was, but they were as good to do battle against as anyone else, and it was also obvious they were well entrenched in their positions and ready to defend themselves— but for me, just like for Don Quijote, the more difficult the struggle, the more glorious the charge. The everlasting appeal of the self-appointed errant knight from La Mancha springs from his...