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[ 129 ] 15 the three things josé martí said all real men must do I’m able to make an appointment to see Enrique Oltuski Osacki on a Friday afternoon at his office in Jaimanitas, close to the Marina Hemingway, after several phone calls to his wife and several to his secretary. It’s an accomplishment that at the last minute I’ve managed to pin down a time to meet the highest-ranking Jew in the Castro government. A Cuban-born son of Polish immigrants, he was a buddy of Che Guevara and one of the leaders of the July 26th Movement in Santa Clara. Since 1971 he has been vice minister of the fishing industry. I am leaving Cuba the next day. I am always coming and going to Cuba, and I have much to do before my departure, bags to pack, people to say goodbye to yet again, but I try to be patient when his secretary asks me and Humberto to wait in the hallway when we arrive for our appointment. As we wait, I start to feel uneasy. I had hesitated to contact Oltuski in the first place, leaving him for the end of my list. I wasn’t sure I ought to be seeking out someone so entangled with the dominant political culture. Maybe I was succumbing to the old fear my mother had instilled in me about being brainwashed by the comunistas . But I worried about the consequences, even if I felt too naïve to even try to imagine what the consequences might be of appearing to flirt with people in power. I’d met Oltuski ten years earlier and found him charming, though it had also been stressful. That time I’d gone to his home and I had to listen to him tell me his life story as he sat under a life-size poster of Fidel Castro. Behar_3P-02.qxd:Behar design 7/30/07 2:21 PM Page 129 A half hour later, we are called into Enrique’s office. In the large, airy room, a desk sits smack in the middle. Above it is an enormous map of Cuba, framed in glass. There is a seminar table on one side of the room and a green velvet print couch and two sunken chairs on the other side. The picture windows at each end let in the vastness of the sky and the gauzy sunshine of the end of the day. Enrique, at seventy-six, is slim, svelte, neatly dressed in a beige shirt and brown pants, and his turquoise eyes shine with the vigor of a man who has lived his life without regrets. After we greet one another, he asks, “Do you like the sea?” When I say yes, he tells me to sit in the chair to the right, so I can face the sea. Before I can say anything, he remarks, “Next week we celebrate the anniversary of our nationalization of the phone company.” He asks if I’ve heard of ETECSA, the Cuban phone company. “Yes,” I say. He replies proudly, “I was the one who suggested we nationalize it.” These days, Enrique says, he has four jobs. He is vice minister of the fishing industry. He is involved in a project, together with the former minister of culture, to recuperate everything that can be known about the history of Cuban independence leader José Martí. He is a writer of books. And on Sundays he puts on his farming clothes and goes out to his yard and tends to his tomatoes, his green peppers, his trees. He asks, “Have you read my books?” I admit that I haven’t. He smiles and seems not to hold it against me. From his desk he pulls out an English translation of one of his books, Mi Vida Clandestina: The Secret Life of a Leader in the Cuban Revolution, so I can have a look at it. Enrique tells me that when he received the first copy of the book he sent it to Fidel and Fidel called him up and told him he’d learned a lot from his book. I smile a polite anthropologist’s smile, keeping my Fidel-phobia under control, and leaf through the pictures. Enrique says, “In my books you’ll find everything you want to know about me. I write for the youth, so they’ll know why we became revolutionaries. I An Island Called Home [ 130 ] Behar_3P-02.qxd:Behar...

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