"A new business term. It means, um, to lay off staff and cut back expenditures and expansion."
"Why not just say that?"
"Businessmen don't talk that way anymore."
"Humph. With Communism dead, I don't see why they'd hide their light under a bush."
"Actually, Communism isn't exactly dead," said Captain Maus. "The Reds still control China, North Korea-although there is some wild talk of unification there-and other pockets here and there."
"Bring me a map."
"Sir?"
"I want to see this new world."
A doctor's voice: "He's not ready for this yet. The optic nerve has been in utter darkness for . . ."
The doctor's voice trailed off.
"Bring me a map," he repeated harshly.
A map was brought.
"Here it is, sir."
"Someone see to my eyes."
Again the young doctor protested. "I can't allow this. There is no telling what kind of trauma this could cause . . . ."
"Either open my eyes for me, or someone fire that idiot!"
"Yes, sir."
The young doctor's stunned voice protested in bewilderment.
"But, sir, you can't mean . . . I mean, I've been an admirer of yours since I was a boy. You can't mean what you say."
"You're on my payroll. Do your damn job."
The doctors set to work, saying, "We'll try it one eye at a time."
"Just as long you do it."
As they were pouring warm saline solution into his left eye in an attempt to loosen the encrustation there, a question popped into his mind.
"What about Cuba?"
"Sir?"
"Cuba. Is it free?"
"Regrettably, no."
"Who's in charge down there? Anyone I know?" The last was a faint hope, but he wanted something to hold on to. Something familiar.
"Castro, sir."
"Still?"
"He'd old and gray, and they're down to short rations and bicycles, but he's still clinging to power."
"Incredible!"
The other doctor said then, "We think the eye is ready now. We would suggest you take it very slowly."
"Shut up!" he snapped.
And, taking a deep breath, he willed his left eyelid to open a crack.
A white-hot needle of light seared his optic nerve and sent his brain crashing through thunderstorms of pain and shock, and somewhere in the distance he heard their frantic shouts and above them the meek, too-young doctor crying, "I told you so! I told you so! But none of you would listen!"
His last thought before he blacked out again was that he'd have that doctor fired. He had been right in the first place, and therefore should have stood his ground. There would be no place for such weaklings in the new order.
Chapter 1
In the waning weeks of the Thirty-third Year of the Revolution, Xavier Custodio went down to the beach to defend the Revolution for the last time.
In the privacy of his wood and royal palm bohio, he went through his morning routine, not knowing it was to be for the last time. First he dressed in his ragged fatigues, taking them off the clothesline where they had been hung, dripping, the night before. He squirmed into the harness that held the wooden cross snugly on his back. Then he picked up his Sovietmade Kalashnikov rifle-it had begun to rust in the tropical moisture-and a single clip of ammunition.
His machete, which he took from beside the door, was not rusted. It would never rust. Unlike the castoff AK-47, the machete was Cuban. Pre-revolutionary Cuban. It would last Xavier his entire lifetime.
With the machete swinging loose in his hand, he walked into the mangrove thicket and began to hack off a sapling. With absentminded skill, he wormed the thin bole into the back brace, so that the branches formed a canopy over his head. His machete made short work of assorted royal palm fronds and other branches.
These he slipped into rips and rents in his raggedy uniform. Once these things had been held in place by string and elastics-Russian string and elastics. There had been none since the fall of the hated capitialationist, Gorbachev.
When he was so festooned with greenery as to resemble an ambulatory bush, Xavier strode off toward the beach, his branches and fronds bouncing happily.
The Caribbean sun was coming up, promising a glorious day. Xavier enjoyed the warm, sultry rays as they seeped through his itchy camouflage. It was a walk he had been taking since the earliest days of the Revolution, when he had been a young man.
Now he was old and bent, and his beard had turned to snow. And while his camouflage bounced, his proud heart did not.
As he trudged down to the beach, Xavier Custodio wondered where the years had gone. And thinking of the passage of time made him wonder where the Revolution had gone.
No, he thought morosely. Where the Revolution had gone wrong.
Oh, it had been so exciting when he was a young Fidelista! He could remember the day Batista had fled in the middle of the night-after a New Year's Day celebration. Xavier had been in Habana when Fidel had marched in with his guerrilleros.