Castro's Curveball

Prologue We are up above the clouds--safe for now. Even through the plane's window, the Caribbean sun feels as hot and dream inducing as I remember it. Besides me, my daughter Cassy sleeps the sleep of the innocent and the stubborn. With my fingertips, I slowly bring her head, with its fine blond hair, to rest on my shoulder. Softly, so as not to wake her, I stroke her neck just as I'd done when she was a child. I listen to the roar of the jet engines, feel this southern sun again on my face for the first time in many years, and wonder what we have gotten ourselves into. Cassy has her mother's round face and my sharp nose. Some would say that she would have been better off with a little less of each, but I don't think that. When she was seven or so, I can remember walking the fields out in back of our house and talking to God about her, wishing her plain. Please, let her be a plain girl, a plain Jane. I was convinced only that would keep her safe in this world. For I know that the pretty and the beautiful, those talented and the gifted, the ones made closest to His image, always end up getting hurt. Of that you can be sure. As with most conversations I've ever had with God, the results weren't exactly as I'd hoped for. In terms of her looks, my daughter didn't turn out to be classically beautiful. But there's something about her smile, the way her gray-blue eyes sparkle, that people, especially boys, always seem to enjoy. Even I am not immune to being carried aloft by her enthusiasm. After all, she is the one who has led me back to Cuba after all these years. My Cassy flies all the time. She is the lone flight attendant on a commuter airline making hops from Buffalo to Cincinnati or Washington or Boston. She makes at least four round trips a day, five days a week. That's why she got such a kick out of how they do things on this Cubana Air flight. No drinks or snacks. Instead candies--peppermint, butterscotch, mango--are offered up in straw baskets to keep our ears from popping. There are no other services on this ninety-minute flight from Cancun to Havana. Cassy's breathing is soft and relaxed. I turn from her to look out the window. Far below, in between the clouds, I catch my first glimpse of Cuba in more than forty years. It's how I remember it--a ribbon of white sand beach and then mile after mile of dark-green interior. After all the times I meant to come back here, especially that night in '53, it seems strange to come back now, with a grown daughter in tow. If it wasn't for Cassy, I would have stayed in Middleport, NY, living on my high school teacher's pension, learning to be a widower after thirty-seven years of marriage. I am coming to the end of many things, and, quite simply, I want to be left alone. My wife, Laurie, died nine weeks ago this Tuesday. I especially miss her on cold mornings and late at night when every sound, real or imagined, echoes through the empty farmhouse on Slayton Settlement Road that we filled with devotion and purpose for all those years. It's funny. Once upon a time I thought that I would be enjoy being alone again. Staying married, learning to overlook the small trespasses that mount over the years, can exhaust anyone. A man can be married to a veritable saint, as I believe I was, and yet he can still find himself walking the fields in back of his house, wondering where he will find the strength to hold himself, hold the marriage together. That's what being married does to you. It demands penance in the form of compromise and responsibility. When your living it, it can all seem to be too much at times. But now I find myself trying to make sense of a different kind of pain. Here again, I think that God has fed me a little off speed pitch to keep me off balance. He has taught me that missing someone you loved deeply makes you long for the days of making adjustments, enduring the rounds of petty disagreements than can diWendel, Tim is the author of 'Castro's Curveball' with ISBN 9780345434746 and ISBN 0345434749.