When they got to the airport Niurka gave him two kisses, Spanish-style, something she did outside Spain only when she was drunk, and wished him good luck. He could feel his new suit, the suit his father’s tailor had made him, attracting approving looks. He felt healthy and clean, as if an invisible detergent had shaken up his insides. As he checked in at the Cuban Airlines ticket counter, the polyester uniforms of the employees and the seventies design of their lapel pins greeted him like an anachronistic cosmogony. He felt slightly apprehensive and thought about the ants with their immense loads. He wasn’t shedding his past – he was confronting it. He was going to look for Susana.

In the security line, some baseball players were cracking crude jokes and telling stories about the night before. Those enormous mulattos had escaped from poverty thanks to their ability to throw balls at ninety miles an hour. He remembered the negative. How many miles per hour had that Molotov been traveling? As he put his navy-blue suede moccasins into the tray, a lump rose in his throat. The love his old man felt for him came to him unblemished, like the homemade bomb at the feet of the police. He looked down at his bare feet, at his flat feet for which the army would have rejected him, a pair of feet that ought to last his whole life and that walked because he ordered them: walk.

‌

With profound thanks to all the friends and relatives who in one way or another supported the writing of this book: Raúl Recio, Miguel Peña, Miguelín de Mena, Bernardo Vega, Abilio Estévez, Viriato Piantini, Lorgia García Peña, Luis Amed Irizarry, Rubén Millán, Gonzalo Frómeta, Sebastián González, Daniel González, and Noelia Quintero Herencia.

‌

‌Dear readers,

As well as relying on bookshop sales, And Other Stories relies on subscriptions from people like you for many of our books, whose stories other publishers often consider too risky to take on.

Our subscribers don’t just make the books physically happen. They also help us approach booksellers, because we can demonstrate that our books already have readers and fans. And they give us the security to publish in line with our values, which are collaborative, imaginative and ‘shamelessly literary’.

All of our subscribers:

• receive a first-edition copy of each of the books they subscribe to
• are thanked by name at the end of our subscriber-supported books
• receive little extras from us by way of thank you, for example: postcards created by our authors

Become a subscriber, or give a subscription to a friend

Visit andotherstories.org/subscribe to help make our books happen. You can subscribe to books we’re in the process of making. To purchase books we have already published, we urge you to support your local or favourite bookshop and order directly from them – the often unsung heroes of publishing.

Other Ways to Get Involved

If you’d like to know about upcoming events and reading groups (our foreign-language reading groups help us choose books to publish, for example) you can: