Travel Reference
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er. For the next two days they were completely inseparable and wanted to sleep in the same
room.Theycommunicated throughmywifewhentheyreally needed toworksomething out.
They will probably know each other for the rest of their lives now, because of that game.
We went out walking the streets, making the rounds to see other family members—to the old
church,withitsbrightlypaintedstatueofSaintJulian,whereWei-Weiwasmarriedandwhere
they remembered her,
“la maestra,”
past the school where she taught and the corner store
her father owned, where first she and then her children, my mother-in-law and her brother,
grewupplaying,beforeitwastakenaway—andaswestrolled,Ihadadiminished,doubtless
much-flawed version of the old woman's cake-box map in my head. I was hearing her voice-
over, all the stories she told me over almost 20 years now, some of them repetitive, but with
details emerging and receding.
Her memories of the revolution begin with the shortwave radio, kept in the backroom by
her husband. Wei-Wei and her husband would gather with friends to listen to the transmis-
sions that the Castro brothers and Che and Camilo Cienfuegos (the best loved of the young
comandantes
, at least by my wife's family, worshiped as a pop star by my mother-in-law,
then11)werebroadcastingfromthemountains,givingassurancethattheywereabouttoride
down and liberate the island. For years I assumed that the family had been listening to these
speeches in fear—as a couple, they were about as solidly middle-class as could be, a teacher
and a tobacco salesman, and their later experience of the revolution involved only pain and
regret—but the
abuelita
surprised me one night, at the table, by saying that, on the contrary,
they heard those speeches with great excitement. No one liked Batista, no one who wasn't
directly benefiting from his thuggery and favoritism. The powerful charisma of the freedom
fighters had percolated down into even quiet, apolitical homes.
There was a night back home, after a long meal, when for the first time after knowing her
forsolong,Igotabitpushywithher—askedherfollow-upquestionsinsteadofjustmm-hm-
ming—andshegavemeadescriptionofwhatithadactuallybeenliketowatchthisoptimism
turn to fear, and something worse, what that had actually
looked
like. When the
milicianos
first came from the mountains, she said, “they come to say hello with this necklace made of
pieces of wood and a gold cross.” They mugged for the cameras with these crosses in their
teeth. I asked why. “For you to look at. To pretend that they are Christian. That they believe
in God.
“Everybody cooperate with Fidel,” she said. “Everybody was happy that we had the op-
portunity to have all the freedom that he promise.” She taught adult literacy classes at night.
Changecamewiththearrivalofthe
comites
,onehouseperblock,appointedasthegovern-
ment representative for its households. The rapidity with which that degenerated into spying
and becoming complicit in spying had been breathtaking to watch play out in stark anthro-
pological terms. Within months, they were taking children aside at school and asking them
