Hawke by Ted Bell Page A

easily the third one he’d attended this week. He no longer bothered to find out who or what they were honoring at these events. They were constantly honoring or dedicating something or other lately, he’d noticed. It hardly seemed to matter what it was.
    They would dedicate a tractor if they could find one that was running, he thought, scanning the crowd for any pretty señoritas. He had come to believe that el jefe either enjoyed being handed wilted carnations by endless processions of schoolgirls or was convinced such festivities took the people’s minds off some of their more immediate problems.
    Like eating.
    An American joke had circulated recently amongst the higher echelons of the Cuban military and State Security. The joke had it that Castro had gotten everything right in Cuba but three little things. Breakfast. Lunch. And dinner.
    Since their beloved comrades in Moscow had abandoned them in the early nineties, his country’s economy had crashed and burned. Cuba now had one of the lowest per capita incomes in the Caribbean, ranking right up there with that other economic powerhouse, Haiti. He was sure that el jefe wasn’t mentioning that little economic tidbit in his remarks.
    The Soviets had poured a hundred billion dollars into the island of Cuba. Where had it all gone , Manso and his band of disgruntled confederates wondered.
    A short list: the army, its uniforms, and missiles. The now-outdated electric power system. A nuclear power plant intended to wean Cuba off foreign oil and left two-thirds completed. A twenty-six-square-mile intelligence-gathering complex outside of Lourdes that Fidel was now trying to peddle to the Chinese. And countless enormous, hideously ugly residential buildings now falling down around their ears because of the amazingly shoddy construction.
    And of course, there was the highway system. Ah, yes. Since shortages of fuel, oil, and machinery parts had paralyzed transportation, the endless miles of highways were utterly useless. Sugar production, the economy’s mainstay, had been cut in half. New tourism efforts were helping some, but not nearly enough. Unless drastic measures were taken, Cuba, already running on fumes, would soon be running on empty.
    Manso shifted in his chair. The metal seat had begun to roast his backside to a crisp. The hot seat reminded him of yet another misery, the shortage of paper. No books, no magazines, no toilet paper . Thank God for the limitless supply of Marxist economic textbooks that the Cuban populace had finally, after forty years, put to good use.
    They also found the Communist paper, Granma, very useful. Published only every other day, it consisted of eight pages full of pap about la lucha, the “struggle,” and how the people must endure these sacrifices for the greater glory. Manso had read an article that very morning stating that not eating was good for you! Privately, Manso had taken to calling Granma the Toilet Paper.
    But there was no shortage of speeches and dedications like this one, Manso thought, mopping his brow. The production of speeches, dedications, and pontifications, always high, had recently gone through the roof.
    The comandante, at the podium well over an hour or so already, was warming to his theme. As if it weren’t warm enough already, Manso thought, reaching for a cup of iced lemonade beneath his chair. The ice had melted but the tangy juice helped a little.
    Out on the lawn, Manso’s olive-green helicopter was waiting. In approximately one half hour, God willing, he and the comandante were scheduled to depart for Manso’s retreat on the southeast coast for the weekend. The two of them would be flying out alone, with Manso at the controls of the aging Kamov 26 helicopter gunship.
    Before Fidel had made him head of State Security, Manso had been the highest-ranking colonel in the Air Force. He had a distinguished flying record and many decorations. He was also the only pilot in Cuba to whom the comandante would