The Translator by John Crowley

pas she couldn’t have understood. “Oh,” he said. “I ain’t a joiner.”
    It was evident to Kit that the FBI had nothing to fear anyway from these people. They had the cheerful contempt for Russian Communists that a smart young pony might have for an old gelded cart horse.
    They acknowledged the Russians’ primacy, and allowed only one another to slight them or make fun of them; in any face-off with the United States they were quick to point out where their own country 78

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    was in the wrong. But their heroes were different ones: Trotsky, fallen eagle, murdered in Mexico; Mao in Yenan, writing poetry; Joe Hill, the bosses couldn’t kill him; above all Fidel and Che and their young bearded men, stripped to the waist cutting cane alongside the people, teaching kids to read. They talked of how when Fidel came to New York to speak at the United Nations, instead of the Waldorf-Astoria he went up to Harlem to stay at the Hotel Teresa; how he joked in English with the students at Johns Hopkins. The young men at East North Street seemed to feel about Fidel and the Cubans the way so many she knew felt about Kennedy: whatever else they were or might become, they weren’t old and sick and stuck.
    The group formed a Fair Play for Cuba Committee chapter and held meetings in the living room at North Street. Delegates came from some of the alphabet-named groups on campus, and some refused to send one, but it was Max and Saul who ran the meetings, read from the literature sent out by the national committee, answered the questions.
    Was it true that the Soviets were sending military help to Cuba?
    “Sure,” Saul said. “And isn’t that reasonable? I mean the U.S.
    invaded the country. But the U.S. line is that anybody who thinks our intentions are anything but sterling is either falling for Communist propaganda or is paranoid. Right. Sure. Look at Arbenz, for Christ’s sake. Look at Lumumba.”
    Did he think that the United States would actually invade Cuba again? The cigarette smoke was thick in the room. Kit didn’t know the persons who were asking.
    “Yes. Absolutely. They’ll invade as soon as they think they can get away with it. But as long as they still care about world opinion, they might hold off. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re doing this.”
    And so then will the United States be able to overthrow the Castro government? Or not?
    “That depends,” Saul said, and lifted his head.
    “Depends on what?” Kit said.
    “It depends on whether, right now, History needs a martyr, or needs a hero,” he said. The shine on his glasses hid his eyes, and Kit couldn’t

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    tell if he was wholly serious; but a kind of premonitory black triumph arose in her own breast that amazed her. Martyr or hero.
    The delegates agreed on an open letter about the U.S. threat to the existence of Cuba as an independent nation, to be sent to whoever might print it and signed by as many important people on campus as they could persuade. And they went on talking, talking. At last Kit tugged Jackie’s sleeve: she had to get back to her dorm.
    “You ought to take that open letter to your friend Falin,” Jackie said.
    “He’s the kind of name it needs.”
    “Oh sure,” she said. “I’m supposed to ask him that?”
    “Why? You think he wouldn’t agree? Wouldn’t want to sign? What makes you think that?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Just because you got a crush on him,” Jackie said. “Don’t mean you know him.” At that she decided to take offense, and said nothing more the rest of the way home.
    “Anyway,” Jackie said, letting her out at her dorm. “You keep it with you. That letter. Keep your eyes open and wait for a good time to ask him. Learn a little about him meanwhile. You owe it to yourself.”
    A crush, an obsession with a magnetic teacher: she couldn’t believe that it was actually a category of feeling, a very common one around here, Jackie said. She did