Free Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire Page B

“Prepárate!” Get ready! We looked forward to the worst: would anyone get smeared with Blackie’s stool? No one ever did, much to our collective chagrin.
    Blackie belonged to one of our neighbors, the nickel mine magnate, the man with the Cadillac and the chauffeur who drove us to school. Gerardo Aulet, our neighbor, had turned his gardens into a zoo, just around the corner from us. A lion, a tiger, a panther, a chimp, some monkeys, other small mammals, and birds. All sorts of birds. Beautiful, exotic birds, held captive in cages large and small. Some of the cages were so large that later, after the world changed and poor people took over this zoo, some of them turned the cages into their dwellings.
    Would that be a sign of progress or one of the saddest things on earth? You tell me. I still don’t know.
    All I know is that it happened to my birthplace and my people, and that my own memories are clouded by passion. As much as I have tried to escape, to obliterate what I was and ceased to be, I’ve been as successful at that as I’ve been at turning myself into a corn-fed, redheaded, freckled, Scotch-Irish farm boy from Indiana. Or Michael Jordan defying gravity. Or Captain James Tiberius Kirk commanding the starship Enterprise at warp speed, wooing every good-looking female that crossed his stellar path, human or alien. And speaking of fictional characters, Popeye might have been the wisest of all time, for he knew instinctively what it has taken me a lifetime to realize. “I am what I am,” or as Popeye put it, “I yam what I yam.”
    I yam Cuban.
    God-damned place where I was born, that God-damned place where everything I knew was destroyed. Wrecked in the name of fairness. In the name of progress. In the name of the oppressed, and of love for the gods Marx and Lenin.
    Utterly wrecked.
    I have pictures to prove it, from twenty years ago, when my mother went back to visit for one week, packing a Kodak Instamatic camera. Everything was already so thoroughly ruined then as to be barely recognizable. The entire neighborhood went to ruin, just like ancient Rome, only more quickly and without the help of German barbarians. The entire city. The entire country, from end to end. Rumor has it that our house collapsed about two years ago and Ernesto, the adopted one, had to move out. But we have no way of finding out. My mother, brother, and I haven’t spoken with Ernesto in more than twenty years. On top of that, Havana might as well be on the other side of the moon, or on Pluto, or the planet Mongo, home of Ming the Merciless, or the outer fringe of the universe, where it’s not houses, but time and space that collapse.
    Anyway, I really don’t give a damn about that house anymore. If it did indeed fall down under its own rotten weight, good riddance. If it didn’t, the first thing I’ll do when I return to Havana is rent a bulldozer and raze it to the ground all by myself. Or better yet, I’ll stuff the house full of dynamite and blow it up. My final firecracker surprise for the old neighborhood, in remembrance of pranks past. I have a neighbor here in town who could teach me how to do it right and without casualties. He blows up things for a living, and his children play with mine. Such a nice guy. So expert with dynamite.
    Would this make my current neighbors ordinary or extraordinary in comparison to those I had as a child?
    Sorry, I digress. Back to my old neighborhood and Blackie’s story: Aulet’s son, also named Gerardo, was our friend. He was such a nice guy, Gerardito. If he hadn’t suffered from severe asthma, he would have become a member of our gang, the sixth apostle of mischief. Such a funny guy, and always so frail, so sick, so pampered. We could play with him only at his own house, and in his own zoological garden.
    Gerardito went to school with Tony and me and shared that perilous Cadillac ride with us every day. He never seemed scared of