He continued to believe as, one by one, the Warsaw Bloc fell, not to aggression or war, but to internal discontent and ineptitude.
Slowly, Leopoldo Zorilla had been forced to surrender his ideals. He visited Havana every year. Every year Havana remained static, the streets choked with inferior Soviet cars and proud pre-revolutionary American cars. The buildings decayed and declined. And no new buildings were built. It was as if Havana-and all of Cuba-were frozen in the late 1950s, not progressing, only deteriorating.
The rations grew steadily worse. Meats became scarce. The Berlin Wall fell. Germany was reunited. The world was at last emerging from a long political Dark Age.
Yet the regime only grew more strident, more uncompromising.
When three Miami-based exiles were captured attempting to make contact with Cuban dissidents, a Popular Provincial Court sentenced them to death. But it commuted to thirty years the sentences of the two who had been born in Miami to exiles. The third, a defector, had been summarily executed by firing squad. Even in the worst days of the Cold War, this had not been done.
The Council of State had given as the reason the doomed man had deserved his fate that he had "enjoyed the fruits of the Revolution, then betrayed it."
In the meantime, under Option Zero-the Presidential decree that required all members of the armed forces to forage the countryside for their own food-Comandante Zorilla had taken to eating banana rats, which he caught in traps because the state's meat-mostly Bulgarian chicken-was so bad. So much for the "fruits of the Revolution." Still, he had reasoned, it was better than eating alligator, as some did.
The night the Soviet Union came apart, Comandante Zorilla was walking the beach of his childhood, dazed and restless. He walked all night. Buzzards flew overhead, as if over a cooling corpse. There had been buzzards overhead in the days before the Revolution, he knew, but now they seemed a portent of the exhausted carcass that his isolated homeland had become.
Zorilla was sucking on a length of sugarcane, the rich brown sucrose juice fueling his nervous state.
He did not remember collapsing. Not even to this very day.
The doctor was leaning over him when he came around.
"You are all right," said the kindly old doctor-one of the last of the good ones because he, like all that was left in Cuba that was good, was pre-Revolution.
"No more sugarcane for you," the doctor said.
"Why not?"
"You have diabetes," said the doctor, handing Comandante Zorilla a plastic packet containing a vial of insulin and two disposable needles.
"Do not throw away your needles," the doctor directed. "Clean them in alcohol."
"There is no alcohol to be had," Zorilla had protested.
The doctor shrugged forlornly. "Do not concern yourself, because soon there will be no more insulin, as well."
"Will I die?"
The kindly old doctor smiled. "Son, we will all die. Some sooner than others.
That night, Comandante Zorilla lay on his bunk, listening to a transistor radio whose sole battery he had hoarded for years. He was listening to Radio Marti.
"It was announced tonight by MININT that meat rations have been cut to one a month. President Fidel Castro Ruz has decreed that Cubans will subsist on sugarcane rather than sell them to the Russian Commonwealth at ruinous prices. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture projections, the sugarcane harvest for the previous year was poor, and expectations for a good one this year are minimal."
That night, Comandante Zorilla packed all that mattered to him: some U.S. dollars he had acquired, and his dwindling insulin supply.
As a military man, he was privy to much intelligence. He knew, for instance, the schedule of U.S. Caribbean cruise ships, although everyone knew these to some degree. For ordinary Cubans took to makeshift rafts and pushed out into shark-infested waters, knowing that if the winds were right they would be sighted by the passing ships, which always picked them up.
And if they were not, they would die.
Comandante Leopoldo Zorilla knew he was going to die anyway. So he stole a Soviet rubber raft from supply and inflated it on the beach. The inflating canister sputtered out with the raft only half-filled. Zorilla was forced to use a bicycle pump to finish the job. The handle cracked at the penultimate pump.
"Nothing in Cuba works anymore," he complained, and shoved off into the night.
It was a moonless night in April. The air was moist and free. And Leopoldo Zorilla-no longer comandante, except of his own soul-lay there dreaming of what it would be like when he reached Miami and defected.
His mind held many military secrets. Enough to expose all of Cuba's weak spots. Choke points. Ill-guarded landing spots. He was but one man, but he could lay Castro's Cuba naked and exposed to liberators.
It would be sweet, this revenge he contemplated.
When the Caribbean sun heaved out of the too-blue waters, Leopoldo Zorilla was astonished to see that he was not alone on the open sea here in the Windward Passage.
All about him, other rafts floated. He looked around wonderingly. It was like a Sargasso Sea of rafts. Mostly, inflated inner tubes floored with mangrove branches. Or rubber tires too bald to serve any other useful purpose.
The balselaros, as they were called, greeted the sun with reverential silence, for all knew that when the sun set, they would either be free or they would be lost forever.
The cruise ship Beasley Adventure hove into view at high noon, when the rays burned hottest.
It was magnificently white and multistoried, like a palace afloat.
Those who could, stood up and waved at the ship with their straw hats. Zorilla waved with his sunburned hands.
The great ship hove to, and landing stages were lowered.
They were taken aboard as if it were an ordinary thing.
Leopoldo Zorilla presented himself to the white-uniformed captain.
"I am former Comandate Leopoldo Zorilla of the Cuban Air Force," he said, his voice choking, for this was contrary to his upbringing.
"Fine, fine," said the captain rather carelessly. "Welcome to our ship. We dock in an hour. Immigration will be there to process you."
"But I am a defector. I have many military secrets in my head."
"Tell it to the INS."
"But I am a military man, like you."
The Yanqui captain almost laughed in his face.
"I'm just a plain old commercial captain. Now if you'll excuse me . . ."
Zorilla had been left stunned. What an ignorant dandy this man is, he had thought. Did he not realize how important a defector Zorilla was?
He did not. Zorilla found himself herded into a hold with the others, like two-legged cattle. The food was good though, and he ate greedily.
At the dock, Immigration authorities came to take charge of them. They did not look pleased with this harvest of defectors.