“All of Cuba is a museum now. That’s what the tourists want, to see the relics of our Revolution – the tanks put out to grass behind the Museum of the Revolution in La Habana, the yacht that brought our exiled revolutionaries back from Mexico listing as the tourists file past, peering in the windows, looking for the ghosts of men who died in an ambush trying to reach the place where Celia was waiting with jeeps, guns, gasoline. We live off our old Revolution, but how much longer can it continue? Soon there will be no-one alive who remembers it. I will be 82, Fidel will be 86. My son lives in Miami, my daughter in Spain, two of my grandchildren have gone to Ecuador. My story has lost its meaning and in the annual repetition of it I have lost my true memories.”

From “Moncada” pp.19/20

It was well after midnight when they arrived on the outskirts of Santiago and began to cruise the streets, asking directions to the nearest hospital. They were sent first to the Provincial Hospital Saturnino Lora, named for one of the heroes of the War of Independence against the Spanish. After many wrong turns they arrived and waited almost an hour before being shunted on to the Hospital Clínico Quirúrgico which dealt with international patients. After another long wait they were informed by the sleepy receptionist that the cadaver must first be registered with a Santiago funeral parlor. Having roused the night watchman of a nearby funeraria and filled out the necessary papers, they returned to Clínico Quirúrgico just as dawn was breaking. Clara was by now numb with exhaustion and readily agreed to have her husband’s remains placed in cold storage while they waited for his insurance money to arrive by Global Excel so that they could proceed with his body to Havana – a journey of at least fifteen hours.

‘Why can’t the autopsy be performed here in Santiago?’ Teo inquired.

The receptionist’s heavily outlined eyelids widened very slightly in her stony face in symphony with the hint of a shrug.

Clara and her brother retreated to their aunt’s house in the suburb of Abel Santa Maria, and there they waited. After three days the insurance money had still not arrived, so Clara made her way back to Baracoa in the safe embrace of her brother.

‘It was Ronald’s last wish to be buried in the cemetery in Baracoa,’ she impressed upon the hospital officials before leaving Santiago. ‘And he wanted to donate his heart to a Cuban,’ she added.

‘Too late for that,’ Teo said.

‘But his pacemaker,’ she insisted, ‘They must remove his pacemaker and donate it.’

From “A Limited Engagement” pp.27/28