Afrocuba

Mi patria es dulce por fuera, / y muy amarga por dentro . . .

--Nicolás Guillén

Thirteen years I've been loading sacks of sugar
onto freightships bound for New York and Louisiana,
at times praying they sink so the lumps
will dissolve like a white ghost. Sugar is the black
man's curse. I'm a hammer-and-machete
Marxist-Leninist revolutionary
tropical-star Soviet grandson-of-maroon
Stalinist cabrón. The Bourgeoisie's destruction
will happen sooner than anyone thinks,
every sugar mill bombed to the ground, the richest land
in America collectivized for indigenous
agriculture. During the Depression,
the cane harvest--la zafra--was just 62 days long,
with papá employed the rest of the year playing dominoes,
drinking rum, screwing sugar-mill whores
on credit, died at 42 from cirrhosis of the liver.
As a maid, mamá earned enough to buy cracklings
she cooked with yuca and malanga; we gorged
on spoiled bananas and mangoes. Compadre,
the runs were a condition of my childhood.
When papá died, we stayed with Aunt Marta
in Old Havana, who taught mamá to fix clothes
on a jumpy old Singer, and I began to work at the docks
with Uncle Cuco, a communist. I'll never forget
Albertico--red as a crab--who hung a rope
in our town's dancefloor to separate blacks and whites.
If a light-skinned mulatto pretended to pass, he'd throw stones
calling him negro bembón, saco de carbón
(big-lipped black, sack of coal). His brujero uncle
took revenge: hexed with fresh-dug human bones and rooster
gizzards, Albertico lost his cruel voice forever.
I don't believe in the African saints but just in case--
por si las moscas--I give Agayú, patron of dock
workers, each Saturday, sliced apples and cerveza.

Orlando Ricardo Menes, a Cuban American, received the PhD in creative writing at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is author of Borderlands with Angels and Rumba Atop the Stones. He has also published poems and translations in The Antioch Review, Chelsea, Indiana Review, and Seneca Review.

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