The Best American Travel Writing 2013 by Elizabeth Gilbert Read Free Book Online Page B

actually
looked
like. When the
milicianos
first came from the mountains, she said, “they come to say hello with this necklace made of pieces of wood and a gold cross.” They mugged for the cameras with these crosses in their teeth. I asked why. “For you to look at. To pretend that they are Christian. That they believe in God.
    “Everybody cooperate with Fidel,” she said. “Everybody was happy that we had the opportunity to have all the freedom that he promise.” She taught adult literacy classes at night.
    Change came with the arrival of the
comites
, one house per block, appointed as the government representative for its households. The rapidity with which that degenerated into spying and becoming complicit in spying had been breathtaking to watch play out in stark anthropological terms. Within months, they were taking children aside at school and asking them about their parents. The parents started pulling the children out. The first nonpolitical families started to flee. People betrayed their neighbors to the
comites
. A woman who lived in the neighborhood, a woman named Solita, “somebody accuse her of having fried pork in her house. And they make—she was a teacher—they make a public,
¿come se llama?, juicio?
” Trial. “Exactly. Accusing her of having pork.”
    My wife’s grandfather had let it be known that he was against the Castros—not because he had preferred Batista; in fact, the family had some obscure connection, that I’ve never been able to get anyone to be forthcoming about, to one of the other revolutionaries in the mountains, a rival who was executed not long after the uprising—in any case it was known that the family’s sympathies did not lie with the communists. “I remember one time we going to the farm,” she said, “and when we was coming back, we stop in Mario’s grandmother’s house, and we saw my brother passing on the road very fast. We get scared. We say, ‘What happened?’ He says, ‘The police is going to ask for, getting into your house.’ And at this time we was already saving some American money to come here. And you believe or not? The first thing that I do in the house was burning the dollars. To be sure that they don’t find it out.”
    The party came and took away the family business. They took the store. They took the car, covered in tobacco advertisements. They took “a house of birds.” Not yours anymore. They took a little dog, named Mocha. They took pictures off the wall. They came in and counted the number of pictures, and took a certain percentage of them. Absurd things. They took away the family’s tiny beach house in Playa del Rosario, “gave it to some fishman.” But this succession of losses came to seem indistinct against what was happening outside. The picture had darkened. “So bad, so cruel all the things that they do it,” she said. “The television was on all day long.” She meant both that they were watching all day long and that the revolutionaries were transmitting constantly. There was “a man that the name Blanco,” she said. And his trial concerned “if he abuse the farmers, if he do all these things that accuse him to do it.” They found him guilty. “Then the people go to the street, singing,
‘Paredon paredon paredon!’ Paredon
means ‘kill in front of the wall.’ And then they put this in television. And you see the brain of this man jumping out. It was getting gross and gross and gross.” She resigned her job, and they essentially went into hiding.
    She got her two children out first, my mother-in-law and her brother, on waivers made possible by the CIA-initiated, Catholic-sponsored airlift known as Pedro Pan. The story goes that the CIA started spreading rumors on the island that the government was about to take away the children, raise them in camps. People panicked, and the planes were waiting to fly them away. The children wound up living with Catholic families all over the United States or, in this case,