Havana Twist by Lia Matera

Author:Lia Matera
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

21

We went home with nothing resolved. I stayed with my father until he got over the worst of it, until he stopped rattling around the big Haight Street flat like a moth in a lantern. Then I went back to Santa Cruz, to my new place near the yacht harbor, a place I’d hoped to love, but could now only live in.

I listened to news broadcasts and C-SPAN speeches, but if foreign policy toward Cuba was affected, it was impossible to tell. We still shook our fists at them and kept our citizens from spending dollars there. We kept out computers and clothes and food and medicine, as usual and as best we could. But that had nothing to do with my mother, or with Cindy and Dennis, or with Myra Wilson and Lidia Gomez. It was the same course we’d been steering for over thirty years.

The San Diego police hadn’t closed the file of Alicia Mendoza or Agosto Diaz, but if they’d had any new leads, they sure hadn’t called me.

I never thought it would end this way, with my mother lost. I never envisioned giving up before I’d found her. But what more could I do? I couldn’t return to Cuba. Even if the State Department didn’t find a way to stop me, the Cubans had thrown me out. They certainly wouldn’t let me back in. And I didn’t know where else to look for Mother or for Dennis and Cindy.

I had, at one point, driven back down to San Diego out of sheer frustration, hoping to thrust myself upon the elusive, scuba-diving Ernest B. Hemingway, M.D. I’d already learned that he was Myra Wilson’s boyfriend, as Agosto and I had supposed. She’d gone to Cuba to see for herself the conditions her partner had fled. When she didn’t return, Hemingway purchased her house so Wilson wouldn’t lose it to a mortgage company in her absence. At the time, he’d begged the State Department to raise a fuss and get her out, but they wouldn’t, saying they couldn’t interfere with a drug bust. Later, when he’d learned about the computers-to-Cuba caravan, he’d resorted to asking WILPF to go to the prison to see Wilson, to make sure she was okay. My mother and Sarah Swann, her WILPF buddy, had both spoken to him about this. Though they considered him a gusano, they’d agreed to do it.

They were certain, Sarah explained to me, that they’d find Wilson thriving in a perfect penal environment. And the scary thing was, Sarah thought they had. She and my mother had been favorably impressed with the “airy, homey” women’s prison.

And as for Dr. Hemingway, he claimed to know nothing more about my mother or the San Diego murders.

So why had he jumped off the dive boat? He’d called home on the boat’s phone and learned his maid had been killed. He saw me and Agosto waiting on the pier and assumed we were reporters wanting to discuss the murder—and wanting to dredge up painful stories about Wilson’s arrest.

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