CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A Gentleman Farmer in Pinar del Río
When Joe Coughlin met up with Emma Gould in Havana in the late spring of 1935, it had been nine years since the speakeasy robbery in South Boston. He remembered how cool she’d been that morning, how unflappable, and how those qualities had unnerved him. He’d then mistaken being unnerved for being smitten and mistook being smitten for being in love.
He and Graciela had been in Cuba almost a year, staying at first in the guesthouse of one of Esteban’s coffee plantations high in the hills of Las Terrazas, about fifty miles west of Havana. In the morning they woke to the smell of coffee beans and cocoa leaves while mist ticked and dripped off the trees. In the evenings, they walked the foothills while rags of fading sunlight clung to the thick treetops.
Graciela’s mother and sister visited one weekend and never left. Tomas, not even crawling when they’d arrived, took his first step late in his tenth month. The women spoiled him shamelessly and fed him to the point he turned into a ball with thick, wrinkly thighs. But once he began to walk, he quickly began to run. He would run through the fields and up and down the slopes, and the women would chase him so that very soon he was not a ball but a slim boy with his father’s light hair but his mother’s dark eyes and skin that was a cocoa-butter combination of them both.
Joe made a few trips back to Tampa on the tin goose, a Ford Trimotor 5-AT that rattled in the wind and lurched and dipped without warning. He exited a couple of times with his ears so blocked he couldn’t hear the rest of the day. The air nurses gave him gum to chew and cotton to stuff in there, but it was still a primitive way to travel and Graciela wanted no part of it. So he would make the trip without her and find that he missed her and Tomas at a physical level. He would wake in the middle of the night at their house in Ybor with stomach pain so sharp it stole his breath.
As soon as his business was concluded he’d take the first plane he could get down to Miami. Take the next available one out of there.
It wasn’t that Graciela didn’t want to return to Tampa—she did. She just didn’t want to fly there. And she didn’t want to return right now. (Which, Joe suspected, meant she really didn’t want to go back.) So they stayed in the hills of Las Terrazas, and her mother and sister, Benita, were joined by a third sister, Ines. Whatever bad blood had existed between Graciela, her mother, Benita, and Ines looked to have been healed by time and the presence of Tomas. On a couple of unfortunate occasions, Joe followed the sound of their laughter to catch them dressing Tomas like a girl.
One morning Graciela asked if they could buy a place here.
“Here?”
“Well, it doesn’t have to be right here. But in Cuba,” she said. “Just a place we could visit.”
“We’d be ‘visiting’?” Joe smiled.
“Yes,” she said. “I must get back to work soon.”
She didn’t really. On his trips back, Joe had checked in on the people in whose care she’d left her various charities, and they were all trustworthy men and women. She could stay away from Ybor for a decade and all her organizations would still be standing, hell, flourishing, when she returned.
“Sure, doll. Whatever you want.”
“It wouldn’t have to be a big place. Or a fancy place. Or a—”
“Graciela,” Joe said, “pick whatever you want. You see something and it’s not for sale? Offer them double.”
Not unheard of in those days. Cuba, hit by the Depression worse than most countries, was taking tentative steps toward recovery. The abuses of the Machado regime had been replaced by the hope of Colonel Fulgencio Batista, leader of the Sergeants Revolt that had sent Machado packing. The official president of the Republic was Carlos Mendieta, but everyone knew Batista and his army ran the show. So favored was this arrangement, the American government had started pouring money into the island five minutes after the revolt that put Machado on a plane to Miami. Money for hospitals and roads and museums and schools and a new commercial district along the Malecón. Colonel Batista not only loved the American government, but he also loved the American gambler, so Joe, Dion, Meyer Lansky, and Esteban Suarez, among others, had full access to the highest offices in government. They’d already purchased ninety-nine-year leases on some of the best land along the Parque Central and in the Tacon Market district.
There was no end to the money they’d make.
Graciela said Mendieta was Batista’s puppet and Batista was the puppet of United Fruit and the United States; he’d raid the coffers and rape the land, while the United States kept him propped in place because America believed good deeds could somehow follow bad money.
Joe didn’t argue. He also didn’t point out that they, themselves, had followed bad money with good deeds. Instead he asked her about this house she’d found.
It was a bankrupt tobacco plantation, actually, just outside the village of Arcenas, fifty miles farther west in the Pinar del Río province. It came with a guesthouse for her family and endless fields of black soil for Tomas to run in. The day Joe and Graciela purchased it from the widow, Domenica Gomez, she introduced them to Ilario Bacigalupi outside the attorney’s office. Ilario, she explained, would teach them everything there was to know about farming tobacco, if they were interested.
Joe looked at the small round man with the bandit’s mustache as the widow’s driver whisked her away in a two-toned Detroit Electric. He’d noticed Ilario with the Widow Gomez a few times, always in the background, and had assumed he was a bodyguard in a region where kidnapping wasn’t unheard of. But now he noticed the scarred, oversize hands, the prominence of their bones.
He’d never thought about what he’d do with all those fields.
Ilario Bacigalupi, on the other hand, had given it plenty of thought.
First, he explained to Joe and Graciela, no one called him Ilario; they called him Ciggy, which had nothing to do with tobacco. As a child he’d been incapable of pronouncing his own last name, always getting hung up on the second syllable.
Ciggy told them that 20 percent of the village of Arcenas had, until very recently, depended on the Gomez plantation for work. Since Senor Farmer Gomez had fallen to drink and then fallen off his horse and then fallen into insanity and sickness, there had been no work. For three harvests, Ciggy said, no work. It was why many of the children in the village wore no pants. Shirts, carefully tended to, could last a lifetime, but pants always gave way at some point in the seat or the knees.