 |
Isabel opened her eyes and lowered the trumpet from her lips. She was sure she had just heard the sound of breaking glass, but cars and bicycles kept streaming by under the bright sun on the Malecón like nothing had happened. Isabel shook her head, convinced she was hearing things, and put her lips back to her trumpet.
Then suddenly a woman screamed, a pistol fired—pak!—and the world went crazy.
People rushed out of the side streets. Hundreds of them. They were men, mostly, many of them shirtless in the hundred-degree August heat, their white and brown and black backs glistening in the sun. They yelled and chanted. They threw rocks and bottles. They spilled into the streets, and the few policemen on the Malecón were quickly overwhelmed. Isabel saw the glass window of a general store shatter, and men and women climbed inside to steal shoes and toilet paper and bath soap. An alarm rang. Smoke rose from behind an apartment building.
Havana was rioting, and her father and grandfather were somewhere right in the middle of it.
Some people fled from the chaos, but more people raced toward it, and Isabel ran with them. Car horns beeped. Bicycles swung around and
pedaled back. People were as thick on the ground as sugarcane. Isabel weaved in and out among them, her trumpet tucked under one arm, looking for Papi and Lito.
“Freedom! Freedom!” chanted some of the rioters. “Castro out!”
“Enough is enough!”
Isabel couldn’t believe what she was hearing. People caught criticizing Fidel Castro were thrown into jail and never heard from again. But now the streets were full of people yelling, “Down with Fidel! Down with Fidel!”
“Papi!” Isabel cried. “Lito!” Her grandfather’s name was Mariano, but Isabel called him Lito, short for Abuelito—Grandpa.
Rifles boomed, and Isabel ducked. More police were arriving by motorcycle and military truck, and the protest was turning bloody. The rioters and police traded rocks and bullets, and a man with a bloody head staggered past Isabel. She reeled in horror. A hand grabbed her, making her jump, and she spun around. Lito! She threw herself into her grandfather’s arms.
“Thank God you’re safe!” he told her. “Where’s Papi?” she asked him.
“I don’t know. We weren’t together when it started,” her grandfather said.
Isabel thrust her trumpet into his arms. “I have to find him!”
“Chabela!” her grandfather cried. He used her childhood nickname, like he always did. “No! Wait!”
Isabel ignored him. She had to find her father. If he was caught again by the police, he’d be sent back to prison—and this time they might not let him out.
Isabel dodged through the crowds, trying to stay away from where the police had formed a line. “Papi!” she called. “Papi!” But she was too short and there were too many people.
High above her, Isabel saw people climbing out onto the big electric sign hanging from the side of a tourist hotel, and it gave her an idea. She worked her way to one of the cars stuck in the riot, an old American Chevy with chrome tail fins, still around from before the Revolution in the 1950s. She climbed up the bumper and onto the hood. The man behind the steering wheel honked his horn and took the cigar out of his mouth to yell at her.
“Chabela!” her grandfather shouted when he saw her. “Chabela, get down from there!”
Isabel ignored them both and turned this way and that, calling out for her father. There! She saw her papi just as he reared back and threw a bottle that smashed into the line of police along the seawall. It was the last straw for the police. At a command from their leader, they pushed forward into the crowd, arresting rioters and hitting them with wooden batons.
In all the turmoil, a policeman caught up with her father and grabbed him by the arm. “No!” Isabel cried. She leaped down off the hood of the car and pushed her way through the pandemonium. When she got to her papi, he was balled up on the ground and the policeman was beating him with his nightstick.
The policeman raised his truncheon to hit her father again, and Isabel jumped in between them. “No! Don’t! Please!” she cried.
The policeman’s eyes flashed from anger to surprise, and then back to anger. He reared back again to hit Isabel, and she flinched. But the blow never came. Another policeman had caught his arm! Isabel blinked. She recognized the new policeman. He was Luis Castillo, Iván’s older brother.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the older policeman barked.
Luis didn’t have time to answer. A whistle blew. The police were being summoned elsewhere.
The angry cop yanked his arm free from Luis and pointed his nightstick at Papi. “I saw what you did,” he said. “I’ll find you again. When all this is over, I’ll find you and arrest you, and they’ll send you away for good.”
Luis pulled the angry policeman away, pausing just long enough to give Isabel a worried look over his shoulder.
Luis didn’t have to say anything. As her grandfather arrived and helped Isabel get her father to his feet, she understood.
Papi had to leave Cuba. Tonight.
