"We have to assume training camp compromised irrevocably. Return to headquarters for debriefing and new orders."
"But my men . . ."
"Must be decruited."
Comandante Leopoldo Zorilla's eyes went stark.
The code word had been agreed upon. Zorilla had agreed to the "decruitment" option. But never had he believed he would be forced to implement it.
"But-"
"You are a soldier. Execute instructions and report for further duty. Word comes directly from Uncle Sam."
"Si, si," muttered Comandante Zorilla into the suddenly dead telephone. Through the rush of blood to his ringing ears he never heard the receiver click.
Woodenly, he hung up, adjusted his insignia-less uniform, and picked up the sole working rifle within the sentry perimeter.
He called in his men, stood them at attention, and with the suddenly too-heavy rifle held loose in the crook of his arm like a duck hunter's, began a speech.
It was a long speech. About duty, about honor, about Zorilla's deep feelings for his men. There was sadness in his voice as he spoke, sadness in the faces of his soldiers. They knew they were to be taken off active duty. A few flinched. They steeled themselves for the actual words when their comandante, circling them on dull feet, lifted his rifle and let the shameful bullets erupt one at a time.
They fell in the time it took for a string of firecrackers to become torn red paper.
It was necessary. It was also shameful. Because he could not bear to see the looks in their wounded eyes, Comandante Leopoldo Zorilla had shot them all in the back.
Then he had gone out into the night to silence the sentries. Finding them already dead, he had fled.
And now he drove through the frosty Florida night, the firefly-like love bugs bouncing off his windshield, making noises like castoff peanut shells caught in a windstorm.
The sound reminded him of the sand against the windows of his comandancia office back in Santiago de Cuba.
There, Comandante Zorilla had been Deputy Comandante Zorilla of the Cuban Air Force. He had been a boy the day Fidel had taken the capital.
It had been a jubilant day, and when Fidel had put the nation under arms, Zorilla, a teenager, had been glad to shoulder them. On each May Day he had taken up an actual rifle and shot at rocks along Jibacoa Beach, pretending they were the helmets of crawling Yanqui Marines.
It was an exciting time to be Cuban.
He enlisted in the Air Force when he came of age. Flew patrols and escorts for Soviet ships. Then-Capitain Zorilla had been so valuable a pilot that they would not send him to Angola to support Socialism there.
It had been the bitterest of disappointments. Until his comrades began to filter back, telling tales of African ingratitude and the wasted lives spent defending a nation that did not care about itself, never mind Cuban sacrifice.
Capitain Zorilla had dismissed these grumblings, for he believed.
He believed even as Cuba peaked in the mid-1970s, all the while suffering horrendous losses in its fight for ungrateful peoples all over Africa.
He believed through the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, because Fidel had told him this was no superpower adventure, but a necessary defense of Socialism. Even as the Hind gunships massacred simple goatherds, Fidel had vowed this.
He believed when younger Cubans were sent to Grenada and were hurled back like toothpicks, heartless and cowardly, by U.S. Rangers.
He continued to believe as, one by one, the Warsaw Bloc fell, not to aggression or war, but to internal discontent and ineptitude.
Slowly, Leopoldo Zorilla had been forced to surrender his ideals. He visited Havana every year. Every year Havana remained static, the streets choked with inferior Soviet cars and proud pre-revolutionary American cars. The buildings decayed and declined. And no new buildings were built. It was as if Havana-and all of Cuba-were frozen in the late 1950s, not progressing, only deteriorating.
The rations grew steadily worse. Meats became scarce. The Berlin Wall fell. Germany was reunited. The world was at last emerging from a long political Dark Age.
Yet the regime only grew more strident, more uncompromising.
When three Miami-based exiles were captured attempting to make contact with Cuban dissidents, a Popular Provincial Court sentenced them to death. But it commuted to thirty years the sentences of the two who had been born in Miami to exiles. The third, a defector, had been summarily executed by firing squad. Even in the worst days of the Cold War, this had not been done.
The Council of State had given as the reason the doomed man had deserved his fate that he had "enjoyed the fruits of the Revolution, then betrayed it."
In the meantime, under Option Zero-the Presidential decree that required all members of the armed forces to forage the countryside for their own food-Comandante Zorilla had taken to eating banana rats, which he caught in traps because the state's meat-mostly Bulgarian chicken-was so bad. So much for the "fruits of the Revolution." Still, he had reasoned, it was better than eating alligator, as some did.
The night the Soviet Union came apart, Comandante Zorilla was walking the beach of his childhood, dazed and restless. He walked all night. Buzzards flew overhead, as if over a cooling corpse. There had been buzzards overhead in the days before the Revolution, he knew, but now they seemed a portent of the exhausted carcass that his isolated homeland had become.
Zorilla was sucking on a length of sugarcane, the rich brown sucrose juice fueling his nervous state.
He did not remember collapsing. Not even to this very day.
The doctor was leaning over him when he came around.
"You are all right," said the kindly old doctor-one of the last of the good ones because he, like all that was left in Cuba that was good, was pre-Revolution.
"No more sugarcane for you," the doctor said.
"Why not?"
"You have diabetes," said the doctor, handing Comandante Zorilla a plastic packet containing a vial of insulin and two disposable needles.
"Do not throw away your needles," the doctor directed. "Clean them in alcohol."
"There is no alcohol to be had," Zorilla had protested.
The doctor shrugged forlornly. "Do not concern yourself, because soon there will be no more insulin, as well."
"Will I die?"
The kindly old doctor smiled. "Son, we will all die. Some sooner than others.
That night, Comandante Zorilla lay on his bunk, listening to a transistor radio whose sole battery he had hoarded for years. He was listening to Radio Marti.
"It was announced tonight by MININT that meat rations have been cut to one a month. President Fidel Castro Ruz has decreed that Cubans will subsist on sugarcane rather than sell them to the Russian Commonwealth at ruinous prices. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture projections, the sugarcane harvest for the previous year was poor, and expectations for a good one this year are minimal."
That night, Comandante Zorilla packed all that mattered to him: some U.S. dollars he had acquired, and his dwindling insulin supply.
As a military man, he was privy to much intelligence. He knew, for instance, the schedule of U.S. Caribbean cruise ships, although everyone knew these to some degree. For ordinary Cubans took to makeshift rafts and pushed out into shark-infested waters, knowing that if the winds were right they would be sighted by the passing ships, which always picked them up.
And if they were not, they would die.
Comandante Leopoldo Zorilla knew he was going to die anyway. So he stole a Soviet rubber raft from supply and inflated it on the beach. The inflating canister sputtered out with the raft only half-filled. Zorilla was forced to use a bicycle pump to finish the job. The handle cracked at the penultimate pump.
"Nothing in Cuba works anymore," he complained, and shoved off into the night.
It was a moonless night in April. The air was moist and free. And Leopoldo Zorilla-no longer comandante, except of his own soul-lay there dreaming of what it would be like when he reached Miami and defected.