Caribbean (124 page)

Keeler said: “I’d say ship him off the island on the first plane out.”

“Where to?”

“Anywhere.”

“Good. Pay his fare and throw him on the plane.”

Keeler said: “When he landed, the airline told us that he had a prepaid ticket to somewhere,” and a sergeant broke in: “He did. But he cashed it in the first full day he was here. Absolutely broke.”

“We’ll have to buy him a ticket. Well worth the price,” the prime minister said. “Will you men promise me that he has no broken bones? No conspicuous wounds?”

“None,” a policeman assured him. “Clothes not even torn. Nothing.”

“I trust you, but as he heads for the plane I want witnesses at the airport who can later testify in court, if he launches a case against us, that he left the island without a scar. Even safer if we have photographs.” As he was about to leave for home and some sleep, he added: “Fetch Tarleton, and his wife too. Clergymen make impressive witnesses.”

As soon as he was gone, Keeler sprang into action: “Sally, go home and bring your big camera,” and when she returned she saw a waiting car that contained three policemen. As it prepared to drive away, Keeler came up in another car containing Canon Tarleton and his wife, and into it Sally climbed for the short ride out to the shack, where handcuffs were applied to the Rasta Man’s wrists and ankles before he was dragged into the rear seat of the police car.

In Keeler’s car the Tarletons had no idea of how the Rasta Man had been arrested, so they peppered Sally with questions. She said: “We went to three different shacks, but found nothing till a little boy told us that he might be at Betsy Rose’s.”

“Who’s she?” Mrs. Tarleton asked from the back seat, and her husband replied: “An unfortunate woman fallen from grace.”

“Were you pleased to capture such a rascal?” asked the canon’s wife, and Sally was ashamed to reveal the details of the arrest: “High time he’s thrown off this island,” but then she was almost driven to add: “I did feel sorry for him when they locked him in handcuffs. He is a free spirit, you know.”

“You sound as if you might have been in love with him,” Mrs.
Tarleton said with the charming frankness that the wives of English churchmen often acquire, and Sally laughed: “Not now, not ever. He had interesting things to say that I think we’d all better listen to. But that was all.”

Not satisfied with this evasive answer, Mrs. Tarleton asked Sally bluntly: “What ideas of the Rastafarian did you find acceptable?” and before answering, Sally pondered how best to share her perceptions. Then, satisfied with her strategy, she said: “Look, I’m the only black person in a car of whites. Just like it was a hundred years ago … Today it ought to be three of us blacks and you, Mrs. Tarleton.” Someone gasped at her boldness.

“But since you three are such dear friends and such worthy people to have on the island, I’ll answer your question, which otherwise I might have found quite condescending.”

She explained that Ras-Negus, no matter how he behaved with women, spoke as an authentic black man, with all the limitations of education and knowledge of history that this implied. She granted that his messing around with the English language, creating words like
overstand
as superior to
understand
was childish, and that his acceptance of Haile Selassie as the seventy-something incarnation of the Lord was preposterous.

“What’s left?” Mrs. Tarleton asked, and Sally replied: “He speaks to the frustrations of former slaves … which is what I am, and all the officers on our island. He speaks to our African heritage, which I feel very strongly sometimes, and to which good people like you never speak. With you it’s all England, England … and what is there in England for us? And he speaks to that mystical word we’re all trying to define and isolate,
negritude
. He taught me more about negritude in ten minutes than you three could in ten years, because he knows and you will never be allowed to know, regardless of how generous you are in your attempts to learn.”

She noticed that the Tarletons in the back seat elected not to respond, but she also saw that Harry, next to her in the front seat, had grown tense and that his hands gripped the steering wheel too tightly, so she quietly slipped her hand onto his left knee, patted it, and smiled as if to reassure him that whereas he would never understand the things that Ras-Negus had known intuitively, he deserved merit for trying.

When they reached the airport she saw something which made her burst into laughter. Her father and her brother had brought the
Rastafarian to the departure lounge in a disguise which masked his membership in the Selassie sect. His long dreadlocks were massed atop his head and hidden beneath a turban which made him look like a proper Sikh. His beard was tucked into the top of a poncho, covering his Rastafarian shirt calling for death to the pope, and instead of leather sandals he wore a pair of immense, cheap white tennis shoes. Whatever dignity his junglelike Rastafarian costume had provided was smothered in this wealth of everyday fabric. More than anything else, he resembled a messy long-haired mongrel dog dragged in from a storm, and Sally thought: You sired eight children in Jamaica and probably two or more here, and look at you now.

But then she heard the loud laughter of the Tarletons and Keeler, and the knowledge that Ras-Negus would be leaving All Saints accompanied by the derisive jeers of white folks was more than she could bear. Determined to make a gesture that would shock her white friends into realizing that she remained loyal to black causes, she pushed past them, ran to the departure gate, threw her arms about the Rasta Man, and kissed him. “Thank you for what you shared with me,” she whispered. Then she drew back to watch him as he lifted his canvas bag, tucked his lute under his arm, and followed like an obedient child as the policemen unlocked his handcuffs and escorted him to the outbound plane.

“D
R
. S
TEVE
C
ALDERON
? M
IAMI
? C
HAIRMAN OF
W
IN WITH
Reagan 1984? This is the White House calling. Please hold for the President.”

“Who is it?” Kate asked, seeing the startled look on her husband’s face, the nervous tapping of his fingers. Then, frowning: “Has the bank refused our request for a loan on the addition to the clinic?”

“Not even close—and you’ll never guess in a hundred years,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. Then he tensed, held the phone away from his ear for a brief moment, and they both heard the husky voice they knew so well from TV and radio: “Steve Calderon? I’m not going to pull the old politician’s trick and say I remember you perfectly. But they tell me you did a great job for the party last time. Hope you’ll give George Bush the same help this November.”

“He’ll carry Florida in a landslide. We Cubans know who helped us when we needed it.”

“Dr. Calderon, some of us would like to have a meeting with you, tomorrow, my office, two in the afternoon.”

“I can be there,” Steve replied without hesitation. And then came the first of the warnings from the President: “Speak to no one about this. That’s of utmost importance.”

“Very good, sir. I shall speak to no one.”

“Well?” Kate asked as soon as he hung up. “What’s it all about?”

“You heard me. I’m to talk to no one …” And she said: “But I’m not just no one.”

She was right, as she usually was. Although Steve was in his middle fifties, he was as much in love with Kate as he had been almost thirty years ago when they drove at midnight in a darkened car twenty miles west of Havana to catch the small boat in which they escaped from Castro’s Cuba. She had been his support then, assuring him: “You’ll find a job somewhere, Estéfano. The whole world needs doctors.” And when at the last moment he had been overcome with fear, it was she who would not allow him to falter: “This boat! Crowded or not, this boat!” and it was almost as if she had willed the frail craft north to the Florida Keys and freedom.

Nor did her courage fail during those first terrible years in Miami when he had been unable to prove his credentials as a doctor; nurses found it easier to get accredited, so Kate, after establishing an excellent record for dependability and attention to detail, persuaded the hospital administrator to give her husband a janitorial job on her ward, and for three years he patiently wore blue workman’s jeans and watched as young American men who knew far less than he made decisions that determined life or death. Since she earned more than he, she paid for the courses he had to take to demonstrate his ability to be a doctor, and ultimately she watched as he marched up to receive his American medical diploma.

When he opened his office on what was to become Calle Ocho, Southwest Eighth Street near midtown Miami, it was her money that paid the rent, and during the first three years she served as his assistant so they could save money, and she encouraged those bold steps which led to Steve’s becoming head of his own clinic with four associates under him, and then officer of one of the first Cuban banks, and finally its president.

Her husband was by no means a passive agent in this spectacular achievement—they were both proof of what an educated Cuban couple could accomplish in a new world. He was an excellent doctor, with a reassuring appearance and manner: tall, slightly underweight, graying hair at the temples, with a winning smile and a habit of telling each patient in Spanish: “Now, Mrs. Espinosa, I’m not sure I know all the answers in your case, but I certainly know how to find out, and we’ll see if we can’t help you.” He’d had such good results that patients spoke of him to their friends, and soon he started treating
Anglos as well and on some days his office was crowded with them.

Until Steve Calderon was forty-eight he had been both a first-class doctor and a bank official, but when one of the biggest banks bought out his small one at enormous profit to him, he became a full-time banker. Kate could afford to stop nursing, and now she served as vice-president at the bank in charge of enticing women in the Spanish community to become depositors. She was also supervising the building of the addition to the medical clinic in which her husband still had a financial but not an operating interest.

The Calderons were repeatedly and justly pointed out as exemplars of the relative speed with which the Cubans of the 1959 immigration established themselves in Florida life, and in their case, at the very top ranks, for Dr. Steve, as he was known, had made himself a major factor in Miami’s social, business and political life. And since the Cubans were fiercely Republican in their sympathies, believing that John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter had let them down at moments of crisis and that Democrats in general were soft on communism if not in fact crypto-communists, the Calderons fell naturally into the Republican party, where both were figures of considerable importance, Kate serving as chairperson of Women for a Strong Republic and Steve as leader of Win with Reagan. Noticeably, neither organization used the word
Cuban
in its title, in order not to alienate the old-time Floridians who resented how effectively Cubans had changed the region from Democratic to Republican.

So when Kate stared with good-natured determination at her husband as he hung up the phone, and said: “Well?” she expected him to tell her what the President said but he parried: “You heard what I had to promise. I can speak to no one,” and she maneuvered: “Tell me only one thing. Cuba?” and he said: “Since I don’t know, I suppose I am allowed to make a guess. Probably.”

Now she became alert, pressing, moving close to him and warning: “Steve, under no circumstance, I don’t care what, must you have anything to do with the Cuban question. It’s just too inflammatory,” and after taking her hands in his, he said: “I know.”

And he did, for if a chain of recent incidents had not reminded him of how dangerous it was, an ugly visit from the wild man Máximo Quiroz would.

The incidents were representative of the pressure under which the Miami Cuban community lived. When a high military officer in the Castro government defected by flying a small plane at great danger to
himself from Cuba to Key West, the American government was delighted to have in their hands a man who might provide substantial information, but even before the cheering stopped, experts warned Washington: “Get him the hell out of Florida right away! His life’s in danger! Those fanatics will argue: ‘If he stayed with Castro this long, he must have been involved in the Bay of Pigs. Let’s shoot the bastard!’ ” So the Cuban general was whisked out of Florida, and four days later the FBI learned that had he dared set foot in Miami, the Quiroz Group had planned to assassinate him.

Máximo Quiroz was a special problem to the Calderons, for back in 1898, when Cuba gained its independence from Spain, the great-grandfathers of Steve Calderon and Quiroz, who stemmed from the same family, formed a friendship which had extended and flourished in the next generations, so that when Steve and Máximo fled Cuba in 1959 it was as fellow freedom seekers, young men of high intelligence and determination. But in Miami, their lives had separated dramatically, for Steve and his wife had followed the path of total integration into the Miami elites, while Máximo had become the obstreperous leader of those Cubans who said in effect: “To hell with America and American ways, we want to get back to a free Cuba,” and his determination was so profound that he was among the first to volunteer for the Bay of Pigs invasion and the last to retreat from that fiasco. The failure of this gallant but shamefully mismanaged mission so infuriated Quiroz that he became a monomaniac who would never rest until Cuba was liberated and Castro was dead. The FBI was wise to keep a close watch on him, for Cuban circles reported: “If any refugee in Miami can be expected to get in a little rubber boat, paddle back to Havana and try to assassinate Castro, it will be Máximo Quiroz.”