The Death of Fidel Perez. Elizabeth Huergo
to climb with some effort.
"His brother, too," Isabel's husband echoed, his enormous, furry belly pressing through the rails of his bedroom balcony.
The crowd below them began to sway and roll under the weight of emotion.
"¡ Fidel calló!" Isabel wept.
"His brother, too!"
"¡ Fidel calló!"
"His brother, too!"
The Pérez brothers, known for nothing in life except the boyish charm that enabled them to cadge most of whatever they needed, now in death began to catalyze an inadvertent turn toward consciousness. The people who heard the commotion early that morning found themselves at a threshold between worlds, suspended for that last aching moment like water coalescing, loosening its tensile grip and then dropping and splattering onto a new surface, much as the body of Fidel and his brother had done.
"What a fitting day for Fidel and his brother to die," someone said.
Justicio, still kneeling by the bodies, looked up. For him, seeing the bodies of the Pérez boys tumbling to their deaths was like witnessing the deaths of his own two sons, or the death of those hopes he had once held in his heart for that generation born on the cusp of revolution. His sons and the Pérez boys— they were stunted, their intelligence yoked to the practical matter of living, of scrambling each and every day to find enough to eat, enough gasoline and parts to make whatever contraption they could get their hands on run another few kilometers. That was all they knew.
"Don't be so offended, hombre." The man grinned. "You have to admit. It's funny. Of all the days of the year. This little dictator and his brother died today, July 26th."
A dark wave of laughter curled through the crowd. Justicio stood up, searching for something to say. Instead he pushed through the crowd and back across the street to the garage where he had left his bicycle cab, his mind drifting, in search of comfort or distraction, and settling unexpectedly on the long-ago image of Fulgencio Batista, his face staring out from the front page of the newspaper. After the Moncada Army Barracks Raid of 1953, Batista had Fidel arrested, tried, and convicted, but he could neither leave him to languish in a prison cell nor kill him. To the Cuban public, Fidel had become a latter-day Robin Hood. So, in order to preserve himself, Batista released Fidel and exiled him to Mexico, never expecting that in 1956 Fidel, alongside his brother Raúl and Che Guevara and seventy-nine other revolutionaries, would return in secret to Cuba. Batista never expected that the peasant farmers along the Sierra Maestra would feed and support Fidel or that the hungriest and the most outraged of the middle class would pour into the streets to welcome him.
In the years between the 1953 Moncada Army Barracks Raid and the Revolution of 1959, as Batista was losing his dictatorial grip on the island, the U.S. continued to insist publicly on its neutrality, all the while supplying Batista's government with arms and military training. In the streets of Havana and other cities and towns across Cuba, men and women were openly clubbed for opposing Batista; prison cells became torture chambers; and police officers members of death squads. The killing and maiming spiraled indiscriminately. The more Batista repressed every grassroots urge for democracy, the more the U.S. buttressed Batista's repression and the more reasonable and noble Fidel appeared. Justicio remembered how Batista's once smug expression disappeared, replaced by the mask that stared out at him from the page: disbelieving, primal, the look of an animal startled, paralyzed by fear. He remembered the dark wave of spite and joy that washed over him; that made him one with the sardonic stranger.
"¡Justicio! ¡Justicio! ¿Que paso?" Irma shouted down to him frantically from an open window.
" Fidel and his brother have fallen," Justicio shouted back, not an ounce of emotion in his voice.
"¿ Donde vas?" Irma shouted, upset that he was leaving.
Justicio made believe he hadn't heard her and began pedaling away. He didn't want to stay. There was nothing he could do. All he wanted was to leave the past, to leave calamity far behind him and to concentrate on how he would feed his family today. He didn't care that it was July 26th, he told himself. As for the sacrilegious stranger, Justicio knew he was no better.
Much like Justicio, some of the good citizens who overheard the sardonic stranger that morning were quite old, as old as the Moncada Barracks hero of 1953 they re membered so well. Gathered there in the street, fearful of change, they could still remember something that had come before this surface they had grown so accustomed to, clinging mindlessly, day after day, until the days had grown into years and the years into decades. For others in the crowd, the 1953 raid was a vague legend. They were so young that Fidel's fall today triggered only a cascade of possibilities, possibilities so enticing that there was no such thing as fear or death or unmitigated suffering. Still others were approaching middle age, and the awareness of their mortality, not as an abstraction but as something visceral, felt in the bone and sinew, had already begun to form its own critical mass, rising within them like an unrelenting tide. Whatever dreams they once had were drained away, revealing the underlying rock, the certainty that time had rendered their passivity into inadvertent choices, while the actual lives they had once imagined had been left unlived and far behind.
At that precise moment, the unexpected and indecorous joke exacerbated a breach between what they had all tacitly accepted and what they all understood and desired. Their laughter transformed each of them, young and old and in between, into conspirators who shared the same hopes. They recognized one another. The decades of be ing separated had passed and were beyond repair, but now the bond among them was irrevocable, the cumulative energy of their response drawing them together with a force as great as gravity, rising to an enormous crest, then shattering over their regrets.
One particular good citizen, Saturnina, was squatting on a doorstep just a few blocks away, feeding a hard biscuit to a hungry stray dog, when she heard the news that Fidel and his brother had fallen. Saturnina rose from her corolla of ragged skirts and began to walk toward the throng of people gathering before the building and spilling over into the street, blocking the morning traffic. Though she could see nothing of what had happened, in a swirl of petticoats and skirts she began to mimic the words she heard:
"¡Socorro! ¡ Fidel calló! Help! Fidel has fallen!"
Saturnina, Sybil of the succulent bit of news that lodges like a string of pork gristle in the space between back teeth, began to fidget and whirl her way through the edges of the gathering crowd, calling out what she had instantly accepted as fact: The apocalypse that would precede the return of her son Tomás, whom she had lost decades earlier in the violent interregnum between Fulgencio Batista and Fidel Castro, had begun.
"¡ Fidel calló! His brother has fallen, too!"
Stepping and swirling, the old woman tripped along the farthest perimeter of the bloody scene. As she passed along the streets calling out her news, housewives peered through rusted iron rails, pulling back quickly into darkened interiors. Men and women on errands or on their way to work or school stopped to listen, then sped on, looking back over their shoulders nervously.
"What did that old woman say?"
" Fidel has fallen!"
"The old man is gone? "
"Yeah, his brother, too."
"You sure? "
The news of Fidel's death began to travel like molten rock down a mountainside, obliterating everything in its path and transforming itself from liquid to solid by the time it reached the entrance to the University of Havana.
"What are they saying about that sick old man? "
" Fidel is gone!"
"What about Raúl? "
" Fidel is Fidel. Fidel can't be replaced."
"I'm telling you they're both gone."
"The government has collapsed? "
"Gone in a single stroke."
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