King of Cuba by Cristina García

Author:Cristina García
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

No sooner had the dictator returned from the aquarium than the morning’s troubles resumed in full force. The crashing euro meant fewer tourists and trade. Imports to Cuba had fallen 37 percent, ravaging the economy. For months, headlines around the world had been proclaiming the death of the Revolution. Fernando’s attempt to lay off more government workers had backfired. Protests were breaking out in Guantánamo and other cities that the army couldn’t fully contain. By every conceivable measure, it was all a fiasco. Only in Cuba, El Líder thought miserably, did citizens expect to survive without working—and moreover, feel entitled to not working.

He rang for his breakfast: oatmeal, stewed fruit, multigrain toast that tasted like sawdust. Today was his birthday, goddamnit, so he demanded a cafecito1 and heaped in six teaspoons of sugar. More bad news. There was a record rice shortage in Asia. Cuba’s sugarcane harvest was expected to be worse than last year’s. The ever-optimistic Granma printed the schedule of festivities to be held in honor of the tyrant’s eighty-ninth birthday—parades in Holguín and Camagüey; a dance festival in Trinidad; a workers’ rally on the steps of the Capitol at noon; and, most infuriatingly, the premiere of Bay of Pigs: The Musical! in Cienfuegos.

That he didn’t already have Fernando’s head on a platter over this abomination attested to his weakness. It was impossible to fight everyone at once. If only he could be like that Bruce Lee, kickboxing his way through a hundred men. Early on in the Revolution, the tyrant had battled his own family first to mute criticism of his policies. Papá’s hacienda was nationalized before any others. His cousin’s sugar refinery was handed over to its workers. After the Revolution took control of the banks, his mother publicly criticized him for displaying “bad manners,” adding: “This is not how I raised my son.” The tyrant couldn’t make her understand that when it came to building a nation, niceties were not a priority.

Besides, next to the Soviets he was a model of civility. For years El Comandante had endured their endless, vodka-fueled banquets—everyone two-fistedly shoveling in heaps of caviar, sturgeon, sheep’s-cheese sandwiches, balyk (the highly prized dorsal sections of salted or smoked salmon), and those beastly pies, heavy enough to use as artillery shells. What the hell were those pies called? Kulo-something-or-other. Kulo-ban-skas. No, no. Kulebyakas. That was it. Colossal, stupefying pies stuffed with oily fish, congealed meats, cabbage. How he hated that stinking sour cabbage! Like eating out of a urinal. Kitchen sink pies. Why, he’d half-expected to find wrenches or chunks of farm machinery between their leaden crusts. His stomach, at least, had been ironclad then.

Once, the tyrant had so mangled a toast in Russian that it sent his Kremlin cronies—with their galoshes and greatcoats and dull, barking basses—into paroxysms of laughter. He’d meant to say: “I salute, with fervor, the young men and women of great Mother Russia, whose future in this land is bright.” Instead it came out: “May the lamb-clad maidens of Mother Russia enjoy their bright morning sprats.

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