Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria by Carlos Hernandez

Author:Carlos Hernandez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rosarium Publishing
Published: 2016-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

Sitting on the plane waiting for take-off, I reread Gustavito’s letter. Not much to go on: Gustavito’s way better in person than on the page. So I closed my eyes and tried to remember everything I could about Mámi.

It wasn’t much. She was executed before I was two. Most of what I knew about her was how she died.

Cuba, 1959: Castro’s coup had, against all odds, succeeded. Che had just won a decisive battle at Santa Clara. As he headed for Havana to join Fidel and the other revolutionary generals, he stopped at places along the way, holding “trials” to punish Batista loyalists. Now don’t get me wrong: Batista was an hijo de la gran puta, and plenty of people who worked for him were his corrupt little putos, building their fortunes off the misery of others. But there were also the decent government functionaries who simply did the necessary bureaucratic work of keeping Cuba going. It was hard to tell who was a bastard and who was just trying to keep society afloat. So you held trials to separate the guilty from the innocent, ¿right?

Wrong. This was a revolution. There needed to be executions. So Che would accuse you of sympathizing with Batista, then you’d offer your defense, then you were found guilty, then he’d stand you in front of a paredón, then a firing squad ripped you apart. Most of those executions took place in La Cabaña prison in Havana, but Che perfected his “pedagogy of the paredón” on the way there. The secret was to get the crowd to demand blood. Then the deaths aren’t on you; it’s the will of the people. “¡Pa-re-dón!” the people yelled. Their new government simply obliged them.

Mámi had worked as secretary to the mayor in the little town of Brota Flor. According to Pápi, the mayor was a likable, handsome sleazebag, all pomaded hair and New York suits. None too bright, and a zángano to boot: always looking for an angle instead of an honest day’s work. So it fell to young Mámi to keep the town running behind the scenes.

This she did for almost a decade. But then when Che came rolling through, the townspeople, caught up in revolutionary fervor, told him that it wasn’t enough just to fusillade the mayor. Mámi was the real bureaucratic brains of the town. If anyone in town had served Batista’s interests, it was she.

The trials were over in minutes. Guilty. Now, the fun part. ¡Pa-re-dón!

When the mayor was brought forth to be executed, he fell to his knees. He wept and coughed and begged for his life. When they went to tie and blindfold him, he tucked himself into a ball and refused to rise. The crowd jeered. “¿What kind of a maricón are you? ¡Stand up and die like a man!” But he remained in that fetal position, wailing into his own crotch. In the end, they had to roll him like an egg up to the paredón to shoot him. Pápi said that his body froze in that position; they couldn’t straighten him out after that.

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