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It took only two tries to get the scrawny calico kitten to come out from under the pink cinder-block house and eat from Isabel Fernandez’s hand. The cat was hungry, just like everyone else in Cuba, and its belly quickly won out over its fear.
The cat was so tiny it could only nibble at the beans. Its tummy purred like an outboard motor, and it butted its head against Isabel’s hand in between bites.
“You’re not much to look at, are you, kitty?” Isabel said. Its fur was scraggly and dull, and Isabel could feel the cat’s bones through its skin. The kitten wasn’t too different from her, Isabel realized: thin, hungry, and in need of a bath. Isabel was eleven years old, and all lanky arms and legs. Her brown face was splotchy with freckles, and her thick black hair was cut short for summer and pulled back behind her ears. She was barefoot like always, and wore a tank top and shorts.
The kitten gobbled up the last of the beans and mewed pitifully. Isabel wished she had something else to give it, but this food was already more than she could spare. Her lunch hadn’t been much bigger than the cat’s— just a few beans and a small pile of white rice. There had been rationing and food coupon books back when Isabel was little. But a few years ago, in
1989, the Soviet Union had fallen, and Cuba had hit rock bottom. Cuba was a communist country, like Russia had been, and for decades the Soviets had been buying Cuba’s sugar for eleven times the price and sending the little island food and gasoline and medicine for free.
But when the Soviet Union went away, so did all their support. Most of the farms in Cuba grew only sugarcane. With no one to overpay for it, the cane fields dried up, the sugar refineries closed, and people lost their jobs. Without Russia’s gas, they couldn’t run the tractors to change the fields over to food, and without the extra food, the Cuban people began to starve. All the cows and pigs and sheep had been slaughtered and eaten. People had even broken into the Havana Zoo and eaten the animals, and cats like this little kitten had ended up on dinner tables.
But nobody was going to eat this cat. “You’ll just be our little secret,” Isabel whispered.
“Hey, Isabel!” Iván said, making her jump. The cat skittered away underneath the house.
Iván was a year older than Isabel and lived next door. He and Isabel had been friends as long as she could remember. Iván was lighter skinned than Isabel, with curly dark hair. He wore sandals, shorts, a short-sleeved, button-down shirt, and a cap with a fancy letter I on it—the logo of the Havana baseball team the Industriales. He wanted to be a professional baseball player when he grew up, and he was good enough that it wasn’t a crazy dream.
Iván plopped to the dusty ground beside Isabel. “Look! I found a bit of dead fish on the beach for the cat.”
Isabel recoiled at the smell, but the kitten came running back, eating greedily from Iván’s hand.
“She needs a name,” Iván said. Iván gave names to everything—the stray dogs who wandered the town, his bicycle, even his baseball glove. “How about Jorge? Or Javier? Or Lázaro?”
“Those are all boy names!” Isabel said.
“Yes, but they are all players for the Lions, and she’s a little lion!” The Lions was the nickname of the Industriales.
“Iván!” his father called from next door. “I need your help in the shed.” Iván climbed to his feet. “I have to go. We’re building … a doghouse,”
he said, before sprinting away.
Isabel shook her head. Iván thought he was being sneaky, but Isabel knew exactly what he and his father were building in their shed, and it wasn’t a doghouse. It was a boat. A boat to sail to the United States.
Isabel was worried the Castillos were going to get caught. Fidel Castro, the man who ruled Cuba as president and prime minister, wouldn’t allow anyone to leave the country—especially not to go to the United States—el norte, as Cubans called it. The north. If you were caught trying to leave for el norte by boat, Castro would throw you in jail.
Isabel knew that, because her own father had tried and had been thrown in jail for a year.
Isabel noticed her father and grandfather heading down the road toward the city to stand in line for food. She put the little kitten back under her house and ran inside for her trumpet. Isabel loved tagging along on trips into Havana to stand on a street corner and play her trumpet for pesos. She never did make much. Not because she wasn’t good. As her mother liked to say, Isabel could play the storm clouds from the sky. People often stopped to listen to her and clap and tap their feet. But the only people who could afford to give her pesos were the tourists—visitors from Canada or Europe or Mexico. Ever since the Soviet Union had collapsed, the only currency
most Cubans had were the booklets you got stamped when you went to pick up your food rations from the store. And food ration booklets were pretty worthless anyway—there wasn’t enough food to go around, whether you had a booklet or not.
Isabel caught up with her father and grandfather, then parted ways with them on the Malecón, the broad road that curved along the seawall on Havana Harbor. On one side of the road were blocks of green and yellow and pink and baby blue homes and shops. The paint was peeling, and the buildings were old and weathered, but they still looked grand to Isabel. She stood on the wide promenade, where it seemed all of Havana was on display. Mothers carried babies in slings. Couples kissed under palm trees. Buskers played rumbas on guitars and drums. Boys took turns diving into the sea. Tourists took pictures. It was Isabel’s favorite place in the whole city.
Isabel tossed an old ball cap on the ground, on the off chance that one of the tourists actually had a peso to spare. She lifted the trumpet to her lips. As she blew, her fingers tapped out the notes she knew by heart. It was a salsa tune she liked to play, but this time she listened past the music. Past the noise of the cars and trucks on the Malecón, past the people talking as they walked by, past the crash of the waves against the seawall behind her.
Isabel was listening for the clave underneath the music, the mysterious hidden beat inside Cuban music that everybody seemed to hear except her. An irregular rhythm that lay over the top of the regular beat, like a heartbeat beneath the skin. Try as she might, she had never heard it, never felt it. She listened now, intently, trying to hear the heartbeat of Cuba in her own music.
What she heard instead was the sound of breaking glass.
