 
Fidel dies every day at thecorner of Calle Ocho and 36th Avenue, rubbed out one table, one diatribe at a time at Versailles, the sprawling restaurant and bakery that is a living history of the exile community here. Old men pound his bones to dust, scattering it with the bread crumbs at what has become a kind of House of Lords for these old men. They have been killing Castro in cafés and bakeries like this since ’59, and killing him over Cuban sandwiches much of the time. They take his life (and maybe his brother Raul’s), return democracy to Cuba, have a fine sandwich, and go home to their beds in Little Havana, Hialeah, Coral Gables, and South Miami, only to get up in the morning and go kill him all over again. They fight this war on many fronts, at El Pub on Calle Ocho, at Villa Habana on Coral Way, between tables of tourists at Puerto Sagua on Collins Avenue on Miami Beach, and at a hundred other places where neon signs flash “Cuban Sandwich,” but none are quite like Versailles. It is the first place I go when I come back to Miami, because it has a fine sandwich, and because it feels like I have left this country without traveling even one more step. Here, old abuelas who once strolled the Malecon and dipped their Cuban bread in café con leche in Cienfuegos and Camaguey now sit, severe and immaculate, beside granddaughters of such beauty that they can take your breath away. An ancient, skeletal man in a glorious pin-striped suit, vintage 1950 if it’s a day, eases between the crowded tables in tan and chocolate brown two-tone shoes. Spanish is all—all—you hear, though locals still marvel at the blond tourist who once inquired of his waiter: “Do you have decaf?” The air smells like roast pork, garlic, lemons, onions, and baked bread, in this place where chicken and rice become arroz imperial, and old men point to other old men and brag that they were at the Bay of Pigs, or they were with the CIA. But on a Thursday afternoon the real action is outside, in the Miami light that photographers say is unlike anyplace else on earth. I hear him before I see him, the one I knew would be here. A silver-haired man with huge, thick prescription sunglasses beats a table like a conga and shouts in that machine-gun Spanish specific to Cubans about liberty and revenge and the day he will walk the streets of Old Havana again. I know better than to interrupt. Across the table from him, seventy-two-year-old Gonzalo Lopez leans on his cane and nods his head. Lopez, a retired engineer, has heard it all before, but that does not mean it is not worth hearing again. “Forty-nine years and three months,” says Lopez, of the time that has lapsed since Castro’s takeover. “We talk, we eat.” Just inside, in a bakery case, trays of Cuban sandwiches sit chilled and waiting. As Spanish is the only language adequate for politics, the Cuban sandwich—and the accompanying intense, sweet Cuban coffee—is the only food really suitable for a change in regime. How could you talk libertad over an order of nuggets and a Diet Coke? It does not seem like it could be as good as it is if you only look at its parts. But if you put it together, press it into perfection, it is something else. “It has to be Cuban bread, crispy,” but soft and a little chewy inside, buttered on both sides, says Lopez. Sliced ham and roast pork—not processed junk but sweet ham and slow-roasted pork shoulder—are layered with Swiss cheese. The only condiment is a little mustard. The only vegetable is pickles. But the magic comes in the mingling of all those flavors as, just before serving, the chef places it in a press, called la plancha, and flattens it until the cheese melts, the bread toasts, and something wonderful occurs, something beyond science. It is the perfect food, say these old men, to fuel their struggle. It leaves one hand free to pound the table, hug an old friend, cross your heart, or raise to God. Lopez does not have a sandwich every day, but every day, he is here. “We call this the Capitol,” says Lopez of Versailles, where so many old exiles congregate to speak of Castro’s death that they must do so in shifts. “One group in the morning, one group in the afternoon, and one group at night. We get together every day, and dream about the Day. There are lots of places, but this is our main place, where we try to figure out which way we can go back to our country. As soon as Fidel dies. That will be this year.” It has been “this year” for a long time, but the Beard is old and gaunt and sick and no longer even officially el presidente, after turning his title over to Raul. Like many exiles, Lopez has seen his circle of friends dwindle as they have waited, right here, for that news. “We are still waiting.” How many sandwiches? “A million?” he says, and smiles. “More?” My mother named me for Ricky Ricardo on July 26, 1959, and that is as close to Cuban as I will ever be. But I have been coming to Miami all my adult life, and lived here twice. I always felt I was on the edge of something here, some falling-off place to great adventure, to a coup in Haiti, a revolution in Latin America, shipwrecks out in the blue. I loved the music, the warmth, the way the women danced as if their hips were somehow disengaged from their spines, and the food, Lord, the food. A hot Cuban sandwich always comforted me, somehow, the way a po’boy does in New Orleans, or a barbecue sandwich in Memphis, or oysters on the Gulf Coast, or the fried chicken of my home in Alabama. It is easy to understand why Cuban Americans love their sandwich, but there are others here, Anglos, who will tell you they would make it their last meal. Todd Hardwick, who once dragged a twenty-two-foot reticulated python from beneath a house in Fort Lauderdale, makes a living trying not to get bitten. He catches alligators and other wild creatures in places where they pose a threat to humans. He is about as Cuban as a snowmobile. But he loves the Cuban sandwich with real passion. He is from here, and has seen Miami’s Cuban community shift from a minority to the most visible and influential part of the city’s diverse Hispanic majority, and the city itself. “I watched a cultural change happen, and like these alligators I chase, I’ve adapted,” says Hardwick. “In Miami, you have choices other than the Big Macs and Whoppers, and I eat a Cuban sandwich almost every day. The bottom line is, when you catch cold-blooded predatory reptiles for a living, every sandwich might be your last sandwich. And it better be a Cuban.” He tries to describe why he loves it so. “It’s the sweet ham, and the pork, and the cheese, and it’s all smooshed together…it’s almost like the sandwich has been run over.” Paul George, a history professor who also grew up here, even loves to watch them being made. To him it is a thing of beauty, to see the sandwich maker, long knife in his hand, shaving the ham and pork. Everything balances on the knife blade. The chef’s hands rarely touch the food. “It’s tasty, inexpensive, and there’s lots of it,” says George. “It’s the iconic sandwich of this community.” But for a Cuban American here, it is not comfort food. It is woven into the character and spirit of the place, but it is not comfortable. Big, dripping pork roasts, vast pots of black beans and rice, sticky-sweet fried plantains—those are comfort foods for Cubans, says Mercedes Ugarriza, who left Cuba in October 1960 and has never returned, and never will, “not until it is a democracy.” “I never remember having a Cuban sandwich in Cuba,” she says. But when she arrived here, everywhere she went in a Cuban enclave “people were eating a Cuban.” She had her first one here, this food of the new revolution. It became, quickly, the perfect food for a long, long discomfort. It is by nature a communal food. People do not make or eat them at home, usually because they do not own a press. “You do not eat a Cuban in front of the TV,” says Ugarriza. You eat one in a crowd, talking. In Tampa, where the sandwich was a staple among cigar factory workers a half century before the Cuban exodus of the 1960s, they add salami to the layers of ham and pork, and other parts of the country have their own varying recipes. But at Versailles and in other political arenas of Miami, there is only the one classic recipe, as there is only one bearable outcome to the situation in Havana. Even for Cuban Americans who say they are not political—and a Cuban who says he is not political is like an Alabamian who says he is unconcerned about barbecue, Jesus, and the Crimson Tide—the sandwich is ingrained in the culture here. It rests beside the expert fingers of the seamstresses on Calle Ocho, rides in lunch boxes at construction sites, and waits in coolers on the big fishing boats tied up in the marinas. It may always be emblematic of a struggle to survive—and prosper—in a new place: just a cheap, hearty sandwich, a worker’s lunch. That may be one reason people with giant, clinking Rolexes like them so. They remind them where they came from, of a time when middle-class professionals fresh from Havana were doing menial work in Miami, to survive. In his crowded shop on Calle Ocho, Ramon Puig, a shirtmaker known as the King of the Guayabera, can trace his history here one sandwich at a time. He owns La Casa de las Guayaberas. In Cuba, he was the Wizard of the Guayabera, but he got promoted, he says, when he came here in 1968. He is eighty-seven now, a busy, busy man whose face is half-hidden by large designer eyeglass frames. He insists on serving Cuban coffee—as sweet as candy, delicious—and relishes it even as he tells you of his diabetes. It is a safe bet that it is not made with Splenda. In Las Villas, before everything changed, he made guayaberas for el presidentes Batista and Prio, but never for Castro. “I was very famous in Cuba,” he says. “I was rich. But Fidel took everything.” He says he washed dishes in a Miami hotel and saved his money to start over. For him, the Cuban sandwich was fuel for his workforce—he brought in sacks of them for his seamstresses—rather than food for a political argument. “We work hard, and we need to eat well,” he says. Now, heads of state all over Latin America wear his shirts. He says he will work until he is one hundred. Then, he wants two things. “I was close to my mother,” he says. “I would like to go to her grave.” And he would like to die in Cuba. “But not as a Communist,” he says. He is quiet for just a second or two. “But I am not political,” he says. Miami is ever changing. The skyline alone changes so fast that most postcards are obsolete. In a city where it seems that the avant-garde can become mainstream and the mainstream mundane, all in a twenty-four-hour news cycle, Cuban Americans have built rich lives, and generations have passed since Fidel rolled into Havana and changed everything. But in ultramodern Miami, an old man still feels the need to scrawl Death to Fidel on a piece of cardboard and hold it aloft to the cars that pass him on Calle Ocho. “I am an American citizen and I love this country,” says Gonzalo Lopez from his table in front of the Versailles bakery. “But we,” he says, looking across the gathering of old men, “are not free.” To some people, outsiders mostly, it is hate that holds them in these chairs day after day. But for many of them, it is a good bit sadder than that. It is homesickness of the kind Ramon Puig feels, of a kind so dense you could mistake it for hate if all you listened to was the politics. “I want to go to the Malecon and smell the sea,” says Lopez of the seawall that was a gathering place for his family and friends before Castro’s revolution—and Lopez’s departure for Florida in 1962. “There was nothing to do but pick tomatoes or pick crabs, or, if you knew somebody, get a job in a factory in Hialeah. I left. I was a bartender. I worked in restaurants, and at the Washington Hilton. I came back here because I wanted to be near Cuba…It [the sea] smells more like home, but it’s not the same.” It may be distance, a distance of time, that makes so many things here a little less, a little inferior, compared with the way they remember them in Cuba. “Back home, there was a place called the O.K. Café,” says Lopez, “and those people sold sandwiches this thick.” He holds his thumb and forefinger three inches apart. He talks about the streets there like it was yesterday, and it might as well have been. Like a vintage postcard, it has not changed since 1962. In his mind, it has not even faded. The coffee, the company, and a fine sandwich help ease that hurt. It will have to do, until a state funeral in Havana. |
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