play this up for publicity.”
“Listen to your brother,” Justo said. “It might not be the best idea, but it’s the only one we have.”
“No.” Frank turned away to face the back of the freezer. “This is ridiculous.”
“Frank,” Pepe circled around him. “Ever since Julie left you’ve been moping around like a stray dog—”
“No I haven’t.”
“Well, that’s the point, no?” Pepe said. “You never seem to care about anything.”
“I care about the restaurant.”
“Well?”
“We have this chance,” Justo said.
“Besides,” Pepe went on. “You know how you always talk about doing something important and making a difference?”
“No.” Frank turned away and avoided his eyes. “I’m not doing it.”
“Think of the restaurant. Think of Papi.” Pepe pleaded, his hands gesturing, clutching desperately at the frozen air between them. “You have to do it.”
“No,” Frank said flatly. “I could go to jail, or worse. Besides, for all we know this business of the chicken is just a bunch of mierda.”
Frank left the restaurant early that night and went home to an empty apartment. When Julie moved out, she’d left him the small dining room table, the futon and an abstract painting they’d bought at a flea market in SoHo. In the darkness, her absence was palpable. But it wasn’t because he missed her. Her company had only been a welcome distraction from the problems of the restaurant. Being alone meant he had to face himself—his regrets. There had been a time when he believed in himself, that one day his life would come together and he would earn the admiration of his family. It wasn’t about achieving his father’s American Dream: a small suburban house with a fenced yard. He had expected more: adventure, love, maybe even wealth.
He moved slowly around the apartment, his shoulders slouched forward, his fingers tracing the places where no memories existed: the wall, the radiator, the window that was screwed shut, the side lamp without a shade. Lately, the smallest tasks had become too much for him. There was a pile of dirty laundry on the floor and a stack of unopened mail on the kitchen counter. The whole place had the sour smell of an old wooden trunk.
He pulled off his shoes, took two Advils and lay on the futon with his arms extended. He stared at the ceiling wanting for the whole thing to go away—Maduros’ imminent bankruptcy, the constant restlessness in his heart, and his father’s ghost chipping away at what little confidence he had. He blamed Filomeno for the way his life had turned out—stuck at the restaurant, unable to find love, unable to commit. He closed his eyes, squeezed them tight, clenched his jaw. He thought of something his father had told him during one of those rare moments when rum had softened the old man’s heart.
“Things happen for a reason.” Filomeno had waved a finger in Frank’s face in his usual dramatic fashion, his breath bitter with alcohol and nostalgia. “But do not be fooled by fate, Frank. It is your responsibility to take advantage of opportunity whenever it presents itself.”
Maybe it was true about the recipe. Maybe it could save Maduros. He understood one thing: if they didn’t have the restaurant, he had nothing. All this about dreams and ambitions was a lie. He was more like his father than he cared to admit. But his father had taken one risk in his life. He had fled Cuba. He’d sought freedom—for Rosa and Pepe. He had given up everything in Cuba, even his own family, to give them all a better future. And he had given Pepe, Justo and him his savings to start the restaurant.
Now Frank had an opportunity to save it.
2
“I don’t know about measurements. I don’t even know how to read. I just look at whatever I’m going to prepare and add what I need. It is something I just know, something I feel inside. And when I’m finished it always tastes the way I want it.”
—Justina Dominguez
cook for the payroll manager at the Chaparra Sugar Mill, Oriente Province, 1909
W hen Frank stepped out of Havana’s José Martí International Airport, he was engulfed by a wave of human longing, of desperate Cubans trying to catch a glimpse of a relative they had not seen in ten or twenty or thirty or forty years. They called out names, waved, cursed, pushed, grabbed and jostled for a better position. Everyone thrust forward trying to be the first to see Frank, to claim him as one of their own and scream his name and hang onto him and cover him with love and tears. But he was not there for any of them.
His spine tightened. This was la tierra de Papi y Mami: the forbidden island, the place his parents had escaped forty years before. This was a Cuba mired deep in the myth of exile. It was the genesis of his mother’s horror stories. She had whispered them to Frank and Pepe like bedtime stories, telling in excruciating detail the atrocities the government had committed on his unknown relatives. She told them about Fidel’s coldhearted cruelty, about how in the days after the Revolution he had rounded up thousands of innocent people in the streets of Havana and executed them without trial and in cold blood, about how he stole land and property to compensate the illiterate peasants that had helped bring him to power, about how he turned one of the richest countries in the world into one of the poorest, about how his beard stank of death, and how the tobacco they used to make his cigars was soaked in the blood of his enemies because he believed it endowed him with power and longevity.
Frank forced his way through the crowd and found a seat in the back of the air-conditioned tour bus. He leaned his head against the window and searched the crowd for the infamous secret police his mother had always warned him about. But all he could see was an innocent mass hoping to reconnect with long lost family.
On the route to the hotel—Avenida Independencia and then Boyeros—depressing gray concrete buildings and apartment complexes followed one another like a long forgotten proletarian utopia. Everyone dressed as if they had acquired their clothes from a thrift store in New Jersey. They waited at traffic lights on the street and outside bodegas. They looked old, tired, their faces creased with the complexities of socialist life, their postures folded by the weight of differential acceptance. The entire panorama was short on charm and long on depression.
But as they came around the Plaza de la Revolución and entered the Vedado neighborhood, Frank’s paranoia dissipated at the sight of the majestic older homes with long verandahs and lush gardens. All of it beautiful. All of it slowly turning to dust.
The lobby of the Hotel Sevilla was a vintage postcard: tall ceilings, huge open windows, dark wood shutters, and walls dressed with colorful Moorish tiles. The percussion of a conga drum and the picking of a guitar flowed from the patio and blended with the loud conversations of brightly dressed tourists and their Cuban friends
The desk clerk flipped through the pages of Frank’s passport and smiled. “Americano. Miami?”
“No.” Frank’s eyes strayed nervously about the lobby. “New York.”
“Ah, New York City. The New York Yankees, eh? You know El Duque?” He slammed the palm of his hand hard against the counter. “Ese hombre es un fenómeno. Is he not the best pitcher in the world? He was with the Industriales before he defected. Now he goes and wins the World Series for the Yankees. I guarantee you he will do it again. And again.”
A man at the end of the long counter turned away, unfolded a brochure and appeared to read. Behind him, a trio of young Cuban women in tight-fitting dresses and high heels loitered at the entrance of the hotel.
“Please tell me,” the clerk said, “do you go see them play at Yankee Stadium?”
Frank shook his head. “I don’t really follow the game.”
“Ah, señor. If I lived in your country I would attend every game. You know, I have two uncles and a brother in Miami. Fanáticos de los Marlins. They went during Mariel in 1980.”
Frank