Except as a spy.
“Will Maximo be at Mima’s party tomorrow?”
“He said he would.”
“Should I be shocked if he acts possessive?”
Mercedes glanced at him, raised an eyebrow. “He would not be so foolish.”
Well, just who was she sleeping with? Hector glanced at her repeatedly, wondering. She appeared to be concentrating on the ball game.
The only thing he knew for sure was that she wasn’t sleeping with him, and God knows he had thought about that far more than any priest ever should. Of course, priests were human and had to fight their urges, but still …
Castro … Of course she slept with him — she was his mistress — that was how she got access. But did she love him?
Or was she a cool, calculating tramp ready to change horses now that Castro was dying?
No. He shook his head, refusing to believe that of her.
Where did Maximo fit in? As he sat there contemplating that angle, he wondered how Maximo saw her?
Mercedes left after watching Ocho pitch an inning. He faced three batters and struck them all out.
When the game was over, Hector Sedano stayed in his seat and watched the crowd file out. He was still sitting there when someone shouted at him, “Hey, I turn out the lights now.”
The darkness that followed certainly wasn’t total. Small lights were illuminated over the exits, the lights of Havana lit up the sky, and lightning continued to flash on the horizon.
Sedano lit another cigar and smoked it slowly.
After a few minutes he saw the shape of a man making his way along the aisle toward him. The man sagged down on the bench several feet away.
“Good game tonight.” The man was the stadium keeper, Alfredo Garcia.
“Yes.”
“Your brother, El Ocho, was magnificent. Such talent, such presence.”
“We are very proud of him.”
“Why do you call him El Ocho?”
“He was the. eighth child. He has the usual half dozen names, but his brothers and I just call him Ocho.”
“I saw that she was here, with her security guards circling …. What did she say?”
“What makes you think she tells me anything?”
“Come, my friend. Someone whispers in your ear.”
“And someone is whispering to Alejo Vargas.”
“You suspect me?”
“I think you are just stupid enough to take money from the Americans and money from Alejo Vargas and think neither of them will find out about the other.”
“My God, man! Think of what you are saying!” Alfredo moved closer. Sedano could see his face, which was almost as white as his shirt.
“I am thinking.”
“You have my life in your hands. I had to trust you with my life when I first approached you. Nothing has changed.”
Sedano puffed on the cigar in silence, studying Garcia’s features. Born in America of Cuban parents, Garcia had been a priest. He couldn’t leave the women alone, however, and ultimately got mixed up with some topless dancers running an “escort” service in East St. Louis. After a few months the feds busted him for violation of the Mann Act, moving women across state lines for immoral purposes, i.e., prostitution. After the church canned him, he jumped bail and fled to Cuba. Garcia had been in Cuba several years when he was recruited by the CIA, which asked him to approach Sedano.
Hector Sedano had no doubt that Garcia had the ear of the American government — in the past four years he had supplied Sedano with almost a million dollars in cash and enough weapons to supply a small army. The money and weapons always arrived when and where Garcia said they would. Still, the question remained, who else did the man talk to?
Who did his control talk to?
Hector had stockpiled the weapons, hidden them praying they would never be needed. He used the money for travel expenses and bribes. Without money to bribe the little fish he would have landed in prison years ago.
Hector Sedano shook his head to clear his thoughts. He was living on the naked edge, had been there for years. And life wasn’t getting any easier.
“Castro is dying,” he said. “It is a matter of weeks, or so the doctors say.”
Alfredo Garcia took a deep breath and exhaled audibly.
“I tell you now man-to-man, Alfredo. The records of Alejo Vargas will soon be placed in my hands. If you have betrayed me or the people of Cuba, you had better find a way to get off this planet, because there is no place on it you can hide, not from me, not from the CIA, not from the men and women you betrayed.”
“I have betrayed no one,” Alfredo Garcia said. “God? Yes. But no man.”
He went away then, leaving Sedano to smoke in solitude.
Fidel Castro dying! Hector Sedano could hear his heart beat as he tried to comprehend the reality of that fact.
Millions of people were waiting for his death, some patiently, most impatiently, many with a feeling of impending doom. Castro had ruled Cuba as an absolute dictator since 1959: the revolution that he led did nothing more than topple the old dictator and put a new one in his place. Castro jettisoned fledgling democracy, embraced communism and used raw demagoguery to consolidate his total, absolute power. He prosecuted and executed his enemies and confiscated the property of anyone who might be against him. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled, many to America.
Castro’s embrace of communism and seizure of the assets of the foreign corporations that had invested in Cuba, assets worth several billions of dollars, were almost preordained, inevitable. Predictably, most of those corporations were American. Also predictably, the United States government retaliated with a diplomatic and economic blockade that continued to this day.
After seizing the assets of the American corporations who owned most of Cuba, Castro had little choice: he had to have the assistance of a major power, so he substituted the Soviet Union for the United States as Cuba’s patron. The only good thing about the substitution was that the Soviet Union was a lot farther away than Florida. Theirs was never a partnership of equals: the Soviets humiliated Fidel at almost every turn in the road. When communism collapsed in the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Cuba was cut adrift as an expensive luxury that the newly democratic Russia could ill afford. That twist of fate was a cruel blow to Cuba, which despite Castro’s best efforts still was a slave to sugarcane.
Through it all, Castro survived. Never as popular as his supporters believed, he was never as unpopular as the exiles claimed. The truth of the matter was that Castro was Cuban to the core and fiercely independent, and he had kept Cuba that way. His demagoguery played well to poor peasants who had nothing but their pride. The trickle of refugees across the Florida Straits acted as a safety valve to rid the regime of its worst enemies, the vociferous critics with the will and tenacity to cause serious problems. In the Latin tradition, the Cubans who remained submitted to Castro, even respected him for thumbing his nose at the world. A dictator he might be, but he was “our” dictator.
A new day was about to dawn in Cuba, a day without Castro and the baggage of communism, ballistic missiles, and invasion, a new day without bitter enmity with the United States. Just what that day would bring remained to be seen, but it was coming.
The exiles wanted justice, and revenge; the peons who lived in the exiles’ houses, now many families to a building, feared being dispossessed. The foreign corporations that Castro so cavalierly robbed wanted compensation. Everyone wanted food, and jobs, and a future. It seemed as if the bills for all the past mistakes were about to come due and payable at once.
Hector Sedano would have a voice in that future, if he survived. He sat smoking, contemplating the coming storm.
Mercedes was of course correct about the danger posed by Alejo Vargas. Mix Latin machismo and a willingness to do violence to gain one’s own ends, add generous dollops of vainglory, egotism, and paranoia, stir well, and you have the makings of a truly fine Latin American dictator, self-righteous, suspicious, trigger-happy, and absolutely ruthless. Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz came out of that mold: Alejo Vargas, Hector knew, was merely another. He could not make this observation to Mercedes, whom Hector suspected of loving Fidel — he needed her cooperation.