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[...] the rebels’ rural habits were laziness and leisure in place of discipline. None was interested in midnight hiking, as the Germans at Wildflecken had been so fond of doing. None was game for a brisk, predawn swim in a cold mountain stream. They had little taste for discipline in itself and the transcendence it promised. [...]
more N
Although there was the plantation boss, Mrs. LaDue remembered—Hatch Allain. A decent man, really, even if it’s true there was a killing connected to him. It seems he did it, she remembered; that was the connection. But that was in Louisiana and a long time ago. And Mr. Flamm the paymaster was killed, true enough. But that was the blacks, and their love of chopping people up with those horrific machetes they carry around. They really do look like savages, and it’s the strangest thing to hear them speaking French—
the last line always cracks me up
She’d wanted to leave for some time now, but her husband resisted. They all did. No job in the States would pay them like the nickel company paid them, they said. Or make them mining executives despite the fact that none of them had Ph.D.’s. Or give them enormous ranch-style homes, enroll their children in private school, on the company tab. No salary in the States would buy a staff of seven servants. Where’s the company yacht, her husband asked her, when we’re living in a midwestern shithole?
that does explain a lot
It was almost Christmastime, and there were humans hanging in the trees beyond the security fence. Mrs. Billings had put up a cheerful breadfruit sapling in the living room—the refrigerated shipment of Virginia pine had not been able to get through because the bandits had blocked the roads eastward. She decorated the breadfruit tree with strings of tiny lights and hollow metallic balls and sang “Jungle Bells” and other carols with the children.
"humans hanging" god i love this
So much of it was a blur, the false alarms that the mine was under attack and they would all have to relocate, followed by announcements that they were to remain where they were. In the early morning, a ship’s horn sounded over and over, a U.S. Navy vessel taking them to safety.
“Only Americans,” a plant security officer announced. “Solo Americanos.”
They needed to get from the mine to the dock, but the Cubans panicked and tried to prevent them from leaving. Pushed and shoved them and blocked the road. “What about us!?” they shouted. Everly knew so many of them—the women who worked in the bakery, and the men from the ice factory near the bay, Lumling, who came by with his cart every afternoon selling little pineapples. One of the gardeners from the club slashed the tires of Mr. Carrington’s Cadillac as they tried to get in it.
“If you leave they’ll bomb us!” a woman cried, grabbing Everly by the shoulders. “There’s nothing here for them to protect if you go. You can’t go.”
this reminds me a bit of emergency sex (evacuating haiti)
The navy ship moved out toward sea slowly, waiting for mines to be removed from the mouth of the harbor. It was morning now, but the fog on the bay was so thick it sopped up the rays of the rising sun and cast a gloomy, opaque white light. As the ship moved out of the harbor, the mountains above Nicaro began to fade, purplish-gray apparitions dissolving in a sea of milk.
There was no red haze of nickel oxide, Everly realized, as she watched Nicaro recede. The chimneys were cold, the plant shut down. The town was clean of its usual coating of dust. The clouds weren’t stained and dirty. There was no fine silt on the surface of the water. It’s so nice, she thought sadly, without us.
Marjorie Lederer sat at the motel room desk, itemizing their belongings from memory, every last appliance and piece of furniture, for which she expected, she said, full compensation.
“From whom?” George Lederer asked her.
“Your employers. The U.S. government. Lito Gonzalez. National Lead.”
“Dear, my employers stand to lose a hundred million dollars on their investment. And Lito Gonzalez ran us out of town, if you believe Hubert Mackey.”
lmao this is gold
This town, Castro said, was the location of his own childhood dreams, this very place where they were gathered. Off-limits and American, it was the site where his imagination had been ignited, and roamed. Freely, he said, but in the freedom of dreams. The town of Preston was make-believe in its distance from his life just a few kilometers away, in Birán, make-believe in its luminosity, its impossibility. But real in its control, its ownership of everything and everyone.
“Off-limits and American,” he repeated. “But of course, as many of you know, we Cubans were invited to cut the cane.”
There was laughter.
“Invited to lose an arm feeding the crushers at the mill. Invited, most graciously, to be fleeced by the company store, whose prices were unspeakable exploitation, invited into a modern and more efficient version of slave labor. But you and I were not allowed beyond those gates over there,” he pointed, “where the managers lived. ‘La Avenida,’ with, take note, the definite article. The avenue, but, of course, only for some. You could not walk down it. You were not allowed to swim in the company pool, go to the company club, use the company’s beaches. You could not fish in their bay, Saetía, or go to school with their children, or date their daughters, or God forbid, should you get sick, be treated at their hospital. You could not own your home, which you yourself had built, own your own plot of land, which you worked with your own shovel, your pick, your hoe.”
The rebels were the state, and overnight. A transition that was not unlike a man waking up to discover he’d somehow married his mistress. A gesture that would surely kill the allure of romance, of luminous desire, in the very fact of its guarantee. Like killing the allure of a new government, a new power structure, in the very fact of its installment. He gazed at the watery horizon, indulging in a childlike wonder at the simple fact that there were unseen worlds beyond the blue. “The sea! The sea!” the soldiers cried out. He felt an old familiar hunger beginning to announce itself, the desire to dissolve back into civilian life and witness the rest of this thing, the completion of revolution’s arc, from a cozily anonymous vantage.
Feelings run high. Just sit at the Teresita for one lunch rush and you’ll get the drift. People who feel that everything was stolen from them, and just because it’s been almost fifty years now doesn’t mean they have forgotten. They haven’t. Nor have the companies. A company is like a person in that it has a memory, its own institutional memory. A company can wait and anticipate with more patience than a person. There are pending claims against the Cuban government that the Cubans ignore. Mining concerns like the old Nicaro Nickel Company keep meticulous account of what they lost. United Fruit became United Brands became Chiquita. CEOs came and went. The claim lives on, in a black binder somewhere at the Justice Department—$350 million at this point, with inflation. After every last person who worked for United Fruit is long dead and gone, still, the company will fight to get its assets back.