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Months before the fire started, Daddy had begun to suspect that some of the cane cutters were rebel sympathizers. He had Rev. Crim reporting on the workers. And you might call it racist, especially nowadays, but it was reasonable to assume that anybody black—whether they were Cuban, Haitian, Jamaican—was trouble. Two months before the fire was set, one of the cane cutters had gone into Mr. Flamm’s office to see him. He wanted chits so he could draw off his pay and get credit at the almacén. But he’d already overdrawn what he would make for the whole cutting season. Some of these guys were foolish about that. They’d get chits to buy appliances at the company store and turn around and sell them in Mayarí for a quarter of what they were worth, just to have the money. Spend it on rotgut or lottery tickets. By the time payday rolled around they had nothing coming. They were working like dogs for no pay, just to get out of debt with the company. This cane cutter and Mr. Flamm had an argument. Mr. Flamm wouldn’t give him any store credit and tried to show him the books and explain why, but the guy wasn’t having any of it. What a shame. There is no reason to bring a machete into company headquarters. Mr. Flamm was a little teeny man in his wire-framed glasses. If only somebody had stopped the guy before he went in carrying that machete. After that, Hatch said no blacks in the offices. Mr. Flamm bled to death right there in the accounting office. That’s not politics, it’s mental illness. There were lots of cane cutters, thousands of them, and as I said, they barely had names. They came over on boats from Kingston and lived in these hovels. The one who killed Mr. Flamm ran off. I don’t know if they ever caught him.
"they barely had names" so good
The company never had operations in Haiti. Daddy said it wasn’t the right political climate for business. In Cuba, we Americans had our traditions, our own world. The company had a set of arrangements with Batista, annual payments, and in return there were no taxes, no tariffs, and we didn’t have to bother with the labor unions or any labor laws. We exported raw sugar, and nobody raised a stink. We sent our sugar up to Boston for processing, to the Revere Sugar Refinery. Batista came to our house. He and Daddy got along fine. I don’t know that they were friends exactly, but they had an understanding.
I’m sure you know the slaves had a revolution in Haiti. A hundred years before slavery was abolished in Cuba, slaves were running the show over there. But instead of voting in a real government, those guys ran buck wild. Put jeweled crowns on their heads and acted like crazed despots, strutting around with white babies on pikes. But what can you expect of a revolution that began with the pounding of African drums, slaves communicating by voodoo? Bloody mayhem is what. Freed slaves running amok in generals’ coats with all the medals and the gold epaulets, and nude from the waist down. They gave themselves ridiculous titles: Chevalier, Viceroy, Generalissimo. The whole thing seems like a bad fever dream. French landowners wallowing in the squalor of their own destroyed estates, lying under the open taps in their own wine cellars, drinking themselves sick. I think they were happy to finally own nothing. Rule no one. Burned mansions, burned crops—the slaves in Haiti torched everything. Of course, slavery is terrible, and as I said, cutting cane is brutal, brutal work. But the slaves were forced, and that’s the difference. On some of the plantations the masters made them wear tin face masks so they wouldn’t eat the cane. Can you imagine? We let them eat the cane, I mean not as a policy, but nobody had to wear any mask. I’m sure it cost more to make those masks than to lose a few stalks of cane.
Maybe we should have seen it coming. It takes a while to put things together. You can’t always do it while it’s happening to you. A week before the fire started, the rebels closed down the main highway east of Las Tunas. That meant they had control of Oriente, so much of which was owned by Americans. Us, and the American government, who ran the Nicaro nickel mine. Batista was persona non grata with the Cubans, and we were caught in the middle. Fidel and Raúl, these were local boys, and I think Daddy was hoping he could reason with them. But after the embargo on U.S. sales of military planes to Cuba, that was in March of ’57, Batista put pressure on Daddy to convince John Foster Dulles—Mr. Dulles was a friend of Daddy’s and a stockholder and his brother Allen was on the company’s board—to find a loophole and get a sale of bombers through. Daddy did that, he spoke to Mr. Dulles, and they set up a pretty crazy scheme. Later, Mr. Dulles told Congress that the Cubans had received the wrong shipment—before the embargo—and the new shipment was simply making good on an old arms deal. Batista got his B-26 bombers. This was in the late fall of 1957. Del disappeared at Christmas that year. It was almost a month later, January 1958, when they torched our cane fields. Batista had been strafing the rebels with his American planes, and the rebels were furious. This is why they attacked us, because of the American bombers. Daddy’s deal with Batista wrecked Daddy’s deal with the rebels. These guys who started the fires, most of them had been United Fruit employees. We were the biggest employer in the whole region. The worst part was that Daddy’s oldest son was up in the mountains, getting bombed by American planes that Daddy had helped Batista to buy.
[...] Everly asked where they were from.
“Hmm. Let’s see. Tela, Limón, Buenos Aires,” Val said, counting on her fingers, “Bogotá, Panama City—”
“Our father built the port in Limón,” Pamela said. “Last year we were in Bolivia. But then troublemakers started rioting.”
“Daddy tried to help the government,” Val added.
“But the troublemakers ended up taking over, and all the good people had to get out of there fast.”
“And now we get here and there’s practically a revolution.”
ahh the naivety of these children, believing that their father "built" anything
“You let your servants cook native in the house?” Mrs. Billings asked.
“Well, I mean, they can cook what they want to feed themselves,” Mrs. Lederer said, “as long as they serve proper meals to us.”
Mrs. Billings said there was no place for garlic and boiled yucca in her house. She’d trained her staff to cook reasonable American dishes, and now all she had to do was train them to eat reasonable-sized portions. She said her servants ate enormous piles of food.
The others listening concurred, and Mrs. Lederer asked how it could be that none of the servants were a bit fat, while she and Mr. Lederer were constantly on reduction diets.
god lol this touches on so many things
The brochure had included a list of difficult questions Americans should be prepared to answer when traveling in uncivilized countries. If you are a democracy, why do whites and blacks eat at separate lunch counters? The brochure didn’t propose an answer, as if the answer was obvious, and the issue was only that a person should expect the question. Mr. Mackey said it was a trick question, and that all you had to say was that democracy had to do with separate branches of government, checks and balances and voting.
As Del was getting up from the table he said, “Don’t you think it’s funny that we teach them agriculture, and none of them own any land?”
That’s when Daddy blew up.
“You got a problem with how things are run around here, then get off your ass and do something about it!” He slammed his fist on the table and made all the silverware jump. “Instead of sitting there with a linen napkin in your lap like a goddamn pantywaist, eating grub I pay for, the flan you asked your nanny to make you like you’re five years old. Go do something. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Nothing but a spoiled goddamn brat.”
what i find really interesting about this exchange is that the dad clearly expects the son to be grateful for the upbringing he gave him. he's pointing out the hypocrisy not cus the dad thinks it's bad [he clearly doesnt otherwise he wouldnt have raised him like that] but cus the son obviously thinks it's bad. but ofc it's a hollow insult because it's an indictment of the father, not the son [but he can't quite grasp that]
I ordered lobster. The lobster they brought me was pregnant, and when I cut into it an orange liquid oozed out—the eggs. I didn’t think I could eat it, but Daddy said I should think of a pregnant lobster as a delicacy. That anything unseemly could be made tolerable if you told yourself it was a special thing, an exclusive thing. Like caviar, he said. I told him I hated caviar, and Daddy said it wasn’t about taste, it was about having things that other people couldn’t have, and there was a certain burden in that.
god this makes me want to vomit
It was Sosa Blanco’s idea that every native must have his hands waxed with paraffin. If the wax showed traces of nitrate, that person had fired a gun. They didn’t bother arresting people. They shot them on the spot, or worse. On the roadside between Preston and Mayarí, Sosa Blanco burned five people alive, four men and a woman who all had nitrate on their hands. He hung them from trees and started a bonfire underneath like he was roasting five New Year’s pigs. I wasn’t supposed to know about that, but Hatch told Curtis, and Curtis told me. The thing is, anyone who works on a farm and handles fertilizer is going to have nitrate on his hands.
Lost in the Russian steppes, where his Waffen regiment was pulverized and scattered and he became an animal, eating raw horseflesh and sleeping in the snow, he’d seen no sliver of home, only a landscape blanketed in whiteness and death. He’d won a “frozen meat” medal, but he’d as soon eat actual frozen meat than fight Bolsheviks again. He understood painfully well that you couldn’t re-create a moment of ignorance that preceded misery, a luminous winking bubble. Ten thousand soldiers setting off to make fortunes, or one man in his Citroën driving toward the Bavarian town of Wildflecken for elite Waffen officers’ training, his papers stamped with a wet, inky swastika, a profound and electric violation of Frenchness. Confessing publicly, after the war, had meant coming to terms with the stark fact that his luminous winking bubble had floated in a tide of darkness. And yet he still yearned for a luminous bubble, for an impossible time of privilege and turmoil. All he could do was keep going until he found a bubble somewhere on the map.