Cuba Run

By David Schaefer

Live-aboard sailor Jake Cousins has no choice: his daughter is in Havana as an agent for a South Florida Cuban exile group and she has been discovered by the Secret Police. Jake must sail to the forbidden island to rescue her. When things go wrong, he's drawn into a prison break and a desperate attempt to escape an island where nothing is what it appears to be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781597053518

Book preview

Dedication

For Kurt Schaefer, Kristin Schaefer Smith and Matthew Schaefer, who still put up with their barn cat of a father.

One

It was an unusually hot day in May, even for Havana, but Pilar Cisneros did not mind the heat because she felt so very good. The dancing had gone very well. On some days, the dancing was just painful work, but on others it was repetition and rehearsal. Then came the muscle memory.

Today her dancing had become more than the combination of the music and her movement having soul. Today she had danced as if she herself were the soul, hovering above the stage watching her own performance and barely thinking about what move she would make next. It was a certain magic that happened with dancers when all elements and practice came together perfectly. For a moment, she had been Alicia Alonso, once Cuba’s prima ballerina.

And she was happy to be outside the elegant but decaying Grand Theater of Havana, with its smell of mildew, marching across Central Park past the towering white statue of José Martí on her way to meet her boyfriend. It was almost 4:30 in the afternoon, but small groups of men still clustered in the shade of the park’s palm trees near the towering statue of José Martí and argued about baseball.

She crossed busy Agramonte Street onto the little plaza with the beer stand and waited again for a break in the northbound traffic on Belgica Avenue. Across the street at the pink El Floridita Restaurant, a government Cubanacán van was unloading a group of tourists wearing white socks under their sandals. She judged them to be Germans. They would go into this old Ernest Hemingway hangout and drink daiquiris and take pictures of each other standing in front of photos of the writer.

She could see part way down Obispo Street, where cars are not allowed, and looked forward to greeting people she was beginning to recognize on her frequent meanderings there. She loved the Cubans, and she admitted to herself that should not be surprising since she was half Cuban by blood and all Cuban by heart.

As usual, there was a young policeman in a dark blue beret, grey shirt and dark pants standing on the corner of the little park opposite El Floridita. Pilar decided he was one of the new ones. He did not yet have a pistol, only a club, but he had already learned the unsmiling, searching demeanor of his peers, looking at each passing person as if they were concealing a bomb, or at least an unhatched plot against the Revolution.

This young policeman with the lean, hawklike countenance also saw Pilar. Even in this city rich in beautiful women, Pilar turned heads, drew stares, promoted suggestions of liaisons from young men and drew appreciative, wistful smiles from old ones. As she crossed the street, he moved forward to intercept her. One moment, miss.

What is it? She was polite but determined not to be intimidated. Random police identity checks happened all the time to everyone in Cuba, and particularly to women her age because of the crackdown on prostitution. People in Cuba seemed to accept being intercepted by police as part of ordinary life, and she had learned what they had learned: there is a way to talk to police that does not let them see your resentment or anger. You smile and joke. Still, the idea that everything could end here sent a little shaft of fear into her stomach.

I would like to inspect your bag. He gestured at the backpack she wore slung over her shoulder. Her bag contained a towel and her dancing leotards, soaking wet with her sweat. Pilar did not want this man fondling her dirty clothing. She did not want to share her sweat with the policeman, not even second-hand sweat.

Why?

It is my job. Let me see your identity card, please.

I am not Cuban, she lied, reaching into the zipper pouch on her backpack for her forged Peruvian passport. After four months in Cuba, she was gradually losing the notion that she was on an adventure vacation. This was not Coral Gables; she was alone and she was an enemy of the Revolution disguised as a graduate student. She could not run to her mother for protection. She would have to prove herself. But wouldn’t her grandfather have been proud of her ? Yes, she could do this. She handed over her passport with a forced smile. The policeman studied it.

These searches were always confusing and unpredictable. Sometimes the policemen seemed to want to know her name so they could greet her from now on, hoping that familiarity might lead somewhere. Others wanted to prove they were important, had power over you. They were supposed to be suppressing prostitution and street crime, and Pilar always bristled at any hint they viewed her as a jinitera, a jockey, the slang word for prostitute. She suspected some of these new police, pulled out of chicken coops in the countryside, could not even read but simply pretended.

Pilar Cisneros, the policeman recited slowly. You are...twenty-seven years old... he flipped through the passport for its stamps...you have been here a long time. Why?

This one not only reads, Pilar thought, he is quick with simple mathematics. I am a student at the Art Institute in Cubanacan.

Do you have the papers?

Yes, she began to dig into the bag.

What graduate program?

Dance...ballet. I am studying to be a choreographer. Do you know what that is?

Of course. The Institute is the other way. Where are you going?

Pilar controlled her temper. She had been raised with the license to do anything she damned well pleased, so she was not accustomed to being accountable to strangers; not even strangers in uniform. I am going to meet my boyfriend at the Center for the Restoration of Old Havana. He is an architect there. He works for Senor Leal, the head of the restoration. Do you know him? Leal was a very powerful man, and although Manuel did not work directly for him, Manuel’s career was on the rise.

Never mind about your papers. Have a nice afternoon.

Pilar was surprised. It was true that a foreign passport bought more leeway than a mere Cuban identity card, but it was no guarantee unless you were an Anglo tourist. Tourism was an important business; tourists were not to be hassled like ordinary Cubans. The cop could have been a real nuisance. It must have been invoking Leal’s name that put him off.

Thank you, Pilar said, but now her sweet mood had started to sour.

Pilar made her way down Obispo Street and her spirits bounced back. She smiled at the old Western Union sign hanging over the street, wondering if after more than 50 years of being abandoned, it would someday simply drop into the street and kill someone, hopefully a Communist bureaucrat with a rubber stamp and carbon paper. A pile of bricks and rubble in the street showed where Manuel’s organization was at work on yet another restoration. Brassy music poured out of Cafe Paris, and Pilar peeked into the doorway to wave at the band and the bartender. The bartender gestured at her to come inside. She laughed and pointed down the street, and he understood where she was headed.

A block farther, she turned right and headed down the cobble street to the tall doorway at the Restoration Center. Pilar briefly greeted the receptionist who was seated at an ancient table in the entrance. The table was bare except for a telephone and one piece of paper. In Cuba, everybody worked for the government and some didn’t work very hard. She found Manuel in his office off the tall, narrow central courtyard, where a huge rubber tree reached for the daylight. He was pecking away at his treasured IBM Thinkpad, and she kissed him under his right ear. Time to play, she whispered.

I yield to temptation, he said, but need two minutes to finish and shut down the machine.

Pilar looked at the large picture book at his elbow. She recognized the building but could not place it. It was very familiar, but the picture was from the 1930s and everything had changed since then. Some buildings had fallen down. But since Leal had been given a free hand to restore Old Havana in 1977, Havana had shaken off decades of abuse and was returning to her old role as Queen of the Caribbean.

Pilar waited impatiently for Manuel. Manuel Santiago was not the most exciting man in Cuba; he was such a bureaucrat. But he loved to dance and was learning how to laugh. They met at the Havana Club, a dance club near the waterfront.

She did not love Manuel, but he had been very useful to Pilar and treated her well. He was ambitious, political to the point of being an apple-polisher. His agenda for advancement involved meeting as many government officials as possible to further his career, and those contacts advanced Pilar’s mission, too.

Manuel was flattered to have the beautiful Pilar at his side. They made a striking couple, he in a crisp guayabera with his moustache carefully trimmed, a little older than she. Pilar, with her dancer’s posture, moved confidently and could engage a man with a gaze that riveted him to the floor.

Manuel believed her story: She was a Peruvian with a successful Canadian father who could afford to support her education in Cuba. She lived in a dorm at the Institute for a while, but then took a room in a private home and spent most of her time there while using the dormitory as her official address. Her landlady liked Manuel. He was a frequent visitor.

Pilar knew, of course, that it would end some day and then perhaps she could help Manuel when a new government was in place in Cuba, when Cuba was a democratic republic like the one envisioned by the patriot José Martí. She could make sure that in the confusion of the change from socialism to democracy and the power struggle that would certainly emerge, Manuel would not be harmed. Pilar imagined how surprised he would be at the truth some day.

But for now, it was absolutely essential that he knew nothing of the truth and had not the vaguest notion that Pilar was there as a member of the Brigade, infiltrating, watching, waiting for the day when the call to action would come.

Few people knew the Brigade existed. It was named in honor of Brigade 2056, the Cuban exiles who fought in April of 1961 at the Bay of Pigs, now all but forgotten by most Americans. Pilar’s grandfather had been taken prisoner at the Bay of Pigs and ransomed later. He once spoke of the prison in Havana, Castillo del Principe, and his eyes had narrowed to slits.

That was a terrible place. Stone. They led us down a ramp into hell. He never mentioned it again, but he had not forgotten. Pilar’s mother was born in Cuba and lived west of Havana in Miramar until she was eleven. She had not forgotten. The family fled to Florida in 1960.

Grandfather would have been displeased at the Art Institute where Pilar attended classes. The property had once been the Havana Country Club. Her grandfather had showed her pictures of himself as a young man in baggy white pants playing golf, with the club house in the background. The club house was now the administration building of the Art Institute and campus buildings had taken over the 18-hole golf course.

Manuel shut down his computer. What would you like to do tonight?

Rhumba, Pilar replied.

It’s too hot to dance, woman.

Hot is good. Pilar was more like her Cuban mother than her American father. She preferred to use the proud Cuban name Cisneros over her father’s name, Cousins. She had not seen her father for a long time and she had not seen him very much at all when she was growing up because he stayed in North Carolina when her mother moved back to Coral Gables to take care of grandfather. Taking care of my father was a polite way of saying the marriage had fallen apart.

JAKE COUSINS SWITCHED on Renata’s white masthead anchor light, packed a dry T-shirt, towel, windbreaker and flashlight into a battered old blue rucksack, slipped the hatchboards into place and locked the sliding hatch. He crawled down into the inflatable dinghy, jerked the little outboard to life and cast off for the marina near the bridge where he rented dinghy dock space by the week, a privilege that also bought access to the shower for $1.50 a scrub. He was off on his evening mission.

Jake’s 34-foot sloop Renata was anchored just off the Intracoastal Waterway at Melbourne, Florida, where the Indian River and the Banana River flow together at the Eau Gallie Causeway. The white sloop swung easily in an east southeast breeze. To the north, on Merritt Island, were the vanishing remains of a 165-foot-long green concrete and steel dragon, built in 1971 for an imaginative woman as a toy for her children,. The locals had named the dragon Annie and talked of restoring it, but it was too far gone and too expensive to repair. Jake remembered seeing it in 2002, a month before it collapsed, crouched on the point as if preparing to jump across the river. Dragon Point was a familiar landmark to cruising sailors on the ICW, marking the entrance to a channel that required paying attention to Daymark G1, not the dragon.

Renata was anchored in 10 feet of water off a lemon yellow Spanish-style villa. Jake liked this place for its wind protection and convenience. From here he could dinghy ashore and walk to find a sailor’s basic necessities: laundry, shower, groceries, ice, beer. He had come to Melbourne to volunteer at the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge, part of a 20-mile stretch of barrier island beach between Melbourne and Wabasso.

He locked the dinghy to the dock with a steel cable. A rented moped was chained to the dock piling. Moments later, as the darkness came, Jake was on A1A headed south toward Sebastian Inlet and the turtle beaches.

Jake Cousins had always been a man who needed a mission. Until he took early retirement and became a live-aboard sailor, his mission was gathering intelligence for the United States Army. Then came the jolt of retirement, the loneliness of living solo on a boat, and the anguish of not really being needed for anything anymore.

Jake had found a new mission at the north end of Florida’s Treasure Coast: saving endangered sea turtles. After eight months of sailing his own lonely voyage, Jake had stumbled onto the saga of the turtles. They were kindred spirits: solo voyagers.

Just north of Sebastian Inlet, he cautiously turned off the road onto a path that cut through the dunes to the beach. The turtle beaches are as important for what they do not have as for what they do. There are few artificial lights that are the inevitable consequence of development, no poor and hungry native population, and no sea walls to protect condominium front yards from erosion. They are protected places for the female sea turtles to haul out and lay their rubbery, ping pong ball-sized eggs in the sand. Lights are a problem for nesting turtles. They often scare a female off, prevent her from nesting. And when the hatchlings come out of the nest 60 days later, in seconds they must run to the sea and swim. They head for moonlight reflected off the water. Turtles confuse artificial lights for reflections, but if they run for artificial lights instead of the relative safety of the sea, they are dead...swooping gulls, crabs or dehydration take them. Jake thought turtle survival taught a harsh lesson about running toward the true light.

For Jake, turtle volunteering was night and early morning work, prowling the beach in the dark to find a turtle that was coming ashore to nest. Once he located one, he waited until she began to dig the nest cavity. Then he would radio the volunteer coordinator and head up to a boardwalk behind the beach and find a group of people waiting to see a nesting turtle and lead them back to the beach. He had been taught how to excavate the back of the nest without letting sand drop into the hole so the visitors could actually see the eggs drop in the dim light of their red-filtered flashlights. In another one of the turtle mysteries, these females had vanished out to sea from this same stretch of beach some 15 to 50 years earlier, drifting on a route that took them to the Sargasso Sea and Europe and Africa, and now they were back for the first time because they had reached reproductive age and returned to where they were hatched to lay their eggs.

The visitors usually came and went between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m., but sometimes Jake would stay and help some of the graduate students who worked all night, tagging new turtles or recording data from those already tagged. At first light, another group of volunteers arrived to walk the beach and count turtle tracks to get an idea of how many had come ashore. The number of nesting leatherbacks had dropped dramatically over the last six years.

When his eyes became accustomed to the darkness of the beach, Jake simply sat quietly with another volunteer at his side, a woman who seemed to be still living in the 1970s, and watched the moonlight play over the shiny wet stretch where the beach met the sea. He had been watching what looked like a rock for more than five minutes. It was a sea turtle patiently processing the risk of coming ashore.

They’re so sweet, the woman said. He had met her before but had forgotten her name. She was, he judged, about five years younger than he, maybe 50. Her hair was blonde and pulled straight back and tied into a pony tail. Her eyes were the pale blue of a watercolor. Without question, she had once been beautiful and was still disarmingly attractive and innocent in a way that suggested she had spent her life in the chosen role of trusting victim.