Văn Trỗi had been captured as he placed explosives on a bridge that was soon to be crossed by McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense. After months of torture, they finally shot him on 15 October 1964. Argenis never forgot that fact, because later that night, as they were getting into the tent Tony Catrain had fixed up in the living room for his son Charlie, Argenis, and Ernesto, Ernesto kept repeating it as though he were praying to scare off a monster.

How many children had been named for figures in his father’s and Ernesto’s dictionary? How many knew the stories behind them? Did they care? Had any of them honored their memories with a warlike act, with the pursuit of an ideal, with a revolutionary deed? Those children, marked by their parents’ ideological passion, who were they now?

The polished bricks of the rooftop’s floor, with its little pink cement stage in the middle, added color to a picturesque scene in which the water tank, which resembled the shell of a Soviet rocket, was the star. A pair of prize-worthy legs crowned with extremely short jean shorts was stood on a wooden crate, so that their owner could peer through the hole at the top of the tank. They were the legs of a sixties Italian actress, just rounded enough yet still far from Rubenesque. Only the calf, thanks to the high-heeled clogs, displayed a timid muscle that directed the gaze down a pleasing slope to the ankle. The comrade’s torso was wrestling inside the tank like an alien with the stalled motor of its spaceship, and the struggle was such that at times her feet came off the box that supported them and hung in the air. Without warning she removed her torso, arms, and head from inside, spattering water about and gasping for air with an open mouth. A kind of hook was in her right hand, but it was no she – it was a lanky mulatto guy. He had no shirt on and was wiping the excess water from his ripped pecs with his hands, which sported long, fake, purple nails. His back was that of a welterweight boxer and, seen in this context, his shaved legs completed the ensemble. “I fixed the tank, niño. I’m Vantroi, your neighbor,” he said. Argenis made an effort to put his hand into the one Vantroi extended to him, and Vantroi shook it with a coarse virility that was in perfect harmony with the tough appearance of his clogs’ heels.

When at last he was under the shower, washing away the traces of masturbation, of Vantroi, and of the Havana heat, the brief uneasiness that preceded his daily dose intensified. The echo of the conflicting halves of his neighbor’s body, Bengoa’s alcohol-fueled gestures, the incessant yelling that came from behind the miserable walls, and his own recent history reached a fatal level, as if someone had suddenly cranked up the volume on negativity. He emerged from the bathroom drying himself nervously, thinking about how bad his mother must have felt when she saw him that morning stinking of shit, unshaven, and incoherent. His heart was racing and he threw himself on the bed with his eyes closed, as if this could stop the images of the past three years of his life from sloshing over him, like crap in a toilet. He opened his eyes and a widened field of vision now included a Quaker Oats calendar that had been tacked up next to a poster of Che Guevara on the closet door. Seen together there, Che’s face – the same one plastered onto hats and stickers all over the world – and the happy Quaker were the two sides of a grotesque yin-yang, on the one hand a socialist ideal turned into merchandise and on the other a contraband capitalist brand that sustained the biological functioning of the revolution against all odds.