Free Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil by Rafael Yglesias Page B

rain came hard and fast and straight; peering up at the window, it was as thick as a curtain. I could no longer see the palm leaves of the backyard tree. Literally we huddled as a family, sheltered from the storm. I was eight. That was the last time my mother, my father and I embraced.
    Overheated afternoon Florida storms rarely last for more than thirty minutes. It’s as if the weather were a toddler, exhausted and frustrated by the long hot day, letting loose a tantrum of rage and tears that is gone as suddenly as it begins. An hour later there was no sign of the cooling rain, except that the suffocating humidity had been slightly ventilated. By then it was time to go. I asked my father to take me with him to the radio show. Ruth, Jacinta, and Pepín all said no.
    Francisco overruled them. He put his arm around me and said, “I have to take Rafe with me. He proves to those Yanquis I’m no crazy radical. How could I be? Look at him!” He hooked me with his arm and squeezed my head. “He’s a real American boy. That radio host will take one look at Rafael and he’ll believe everything I say.”
    He insisted Grandpa stay home to keep Grandma company. “I’ll be my own chauffeur,” he said. I sat in the back seat of the Plymouth; my mother rode in the front with Francisco. I can’t recall (and there have been many concentrated attempts at recovering all the details of that day) what stopped me from remembering the blue car with the white hat and mentioning it to my parents. I can summon a vivid memory of pressing my face against the rear window to see if there were any cars behind us. Why did I do that, if not to search for the blue and white car? Maybe I was uninformative because I didn’t have a chance to look very long. Francisco, tense while he searched for the radio station’s building, snapped, “Sit down, Rafe! I can’t see out the rearview mirror!”
    The radio station was in a beige four-story building beside a highway overpass. The street consisted of office buildings and had a spooky deserted look, although it was early evening. We parked across from the entrance.
    The host signed my cast. So did his producer, a young woman. They were friendly. The producer gave me a Coke and brought my parents coffee. The host was especially cheerful and welcoming. Until airtime.
    “Aren’t you a Communist sympathizer, Mr. Neruda? I’ve read your article in the New York Times.” He said New York as though it were contemptible. “You make every possible excuse for Fidel Castro’s crimes of robbery and murder. It doesn’t matter that he has destroyed countless family businesses, grabbing the money they worked hard for, supposedly to spend on the peasants. My bet is it’s all going into a Swiss bank account. But you and the New York Times tell us it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that Castro has firing squads working round the clock killing people whose only crime was that they were soldiers following orders. You call these understandable excesses. Some excesses. I wonder how you would feel if some foreign reporter called it an understandable excess when the Communists take all your money and shoot you in cold blood.”
    Ruth and I were in a room down the hall from the studio where we had been graciously invited by the producer to make ourselves comfortable. We could listen to the show over a speaker mounted flush into the ceiling.
    “My God,” she whispered, shocked. I glanced at her and worried about the beat of silence. My father didn’t answer immediately. If he was feeling anything like the way my mother looked, then it was going to be a quiet program.
    Francisco’s voice finally did come down from on high. He sounded calm and amused. “I’m not sure I know what your question is, Ron. I didn’t write that murder and robbery is understandable. I did write that there aren’t revolutions without people being killed. There were lots of killings on both sides. As for these family businesses you