Cuba on the Verge by Leila Guerriero

Author:Leila Guerriero
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

The day after Fidel’s birthday, Gerardo had planned to bring Giro, his fighting cock, to the Wajay cockpit. He had owned this rooster for five months and had raised him with good food in the yard of his house, in Marianao. Though at first, knowing nothing about cocks, he’d laughed when some cousins gave him to him for his forty-third birthday, one week later he was imagining the animal’s great exploits that would bring him glory. One day as we were entering the Old Square—which, with its recent sprucing up, is regaining its sophisticated Italian feeling despite the poor neighborhood surrounding it—he told me that his cock crowed “real loud” and that it had “the dick of a pig.” He got himself a chicken foot, tied it to a stick, and used that instrument to goad the cock, to train his anger. When he wasn’t doing that, he had Giro in his arms. As he told me, he’d started to care about the animal from so much dreaming about his warrior exploits, admiring his curved beak and his intelligence when he attacked the foot tied to the stick. After they’d spent five months together, one of the cousins assured him the animal was ready for any showdown and put him in touch with a certain Amadeo, owner of the Wajay ring, where that very Sunday they were holding cockfights.

Gerardo arrived at Señora Ruth’s house in Vedado before noon to pick me up. He had Giro in a cage in the Lada’s backseat: white feathers around his neck and like straw over his chest, black beak stained with lime, his crest blood colored and wrinkled like a burned little finger, and a shining gray body. He looks more like an ambassador, I thought when I saw him, than a murderer. Gerardo’s cousin had given him fifty CUC to bet, and Gerardo was betting two hundred, almost all he had saved up to send his car to the body shop.

Wajay is some twenty kilometers from downtown Havana in the direction of the airport, very close to Fontanar, in the area of Chico. The earth is red and pasty there, and serves as a quarry for potters. You had to ask around to get directions to the place, starting from the exit off the highway. A man who was going to the cockfight on a bicycle guided us. When we reached a house at the side of the road he recommended we park the car there, where he was going to leave his bike, and continue on foot. If the police came and found the vehicle at the cockpit, they could seize it. Cockfights were supposedly illegal, though everyone knows that the upper ranks of the hierarchy include several fans. It was at a cockfight, on February 24, 1895, in the city of Bayamo, when a group of patriots gave the cry of “Libertad!” (Freedom)—the cry known as the Grito de Oriente because the War of Independence started in Oriente, the western part of Cuba—that began the Second War of Independence in Cuba.

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