Up and down the corridor and over three floors, sometimes almost running, he gave things away, the Cuban Santa Claus of modern medicine—all the small portable equipment, all the retorts, all the lovely unused supplies. He picked up the centrifuge and carried it into Rivkind’s small lab. The microscope, a useful object in public health work, he packed tenderly and sent off to Paula in the fierce mountains where she was a real doctor. Then he left his key and a short but grateful letter of resignation in the Dean’s mailbox and walked from the building, his heart trailing great painful drops, almost visible.

So.

He was not a medical researcher.

He would listen to his father’s genes and be a sugar man.

He went to the office at the central every day.

At Uncle Erneido’s left elbow (Guillermo at his right) he sat in on sales meetings, production meetings, key hirings, key firings, scheduling sessions, shipping conferences.

No longer a big, overgrown little boy playing at man of science.

Now, he knew, a big, overgrown little boy playing at man of business.

Every evening when he left the office he would go to one of several drinking clubs by prearrangement and in a little while Guillermo would show up with the women, mostly semi-professionals but sometimes, like an appetizer, not; as they crossed the room to where he was sitting and waiting Rafe made a game of trying to guess correctly and he was often wrong. One pair he had classified as call girls turned out to be two schoolteachers from Flint, Michigan, facing their need to feel guilty but used.

Guillermo, he soon realized, was second-rate in this as in other matters. They went to tritely-wicked places, drug pads, sex circuses, the clichés which knowing and wiser Habaneros hooted at as traps for self-conscious Yanqui tourists, the Hemingway seekers. He found himself drifting toward a bloated future. He could see himself in ten years, dull-eyed and uncaring, sucking the sugar teat and swapping filthy tales with Guillermo in the bars along the Prado. And yet he felt curiously powerless to pull out, as if he were a Hindu figure frozen against his will in a lewd stone frieze, cursing the sculptor.

Later, there was never any doubt in his mind that he was saved by Fidel Castro.

For a couple of days everyone stayed in his own home. There was some self-righteous wrecking and looting, places like the Deauville Casino where Batista had split the take with American gamblers.

Castro men were everywhere, wearing a variety of dirty dress. Their uniforms were the red and black 26 de Julio armbands, the loaded rifles and the beards that made some of them Christ-like and some merely goatlike. The firing squad executions commenced in the Havana Sports Palace and were continued daily, sometimes with matinees.