Spy in a Little Black Dress - By Maxine Kenneth Page 0,46
I worked as a lector? It’s in the Vedado, the University of Havana neighborhood. I can take us there in my car, and you can see an actual reading for yourself.”
“Oh, I’d love that,” Jackie said. “Let’s do it.”
Emiliano’s car was an old, bilious green Chevrolet, déclassé for the Tropicana, but not nearly so embarrassing as the rattletrap truck that had brought him to her when they first met.
“I like this neighborhood,” Jackie said when they entered the barrio of El Vedado. It was a pleasant downtown district with lots of exclusive-looking shops and businesses, a large public square, and an abundance of dance clubs and cabarets common to a university town. And of course, there was a movie theatre with the name YARA in bold letters on the front. It was not nearly as impressive as El Teatro de Cinema in Habana Vieja, but it looked large for a local theatre.
“Many film festivals are held in that movie house,” Emiliano said, pointing to the Yara, “and the round building in front is the Coppelia ice cream café, where the students like to congregate.”
When they came to a large building on the corner of Figuras Street—the H. UPMANN BUILDING, the sign said—Emiliano drove around to the back and parked on the lot.
“Upmann? That sounds German,” Jackie said as they walked toward the entrance.
“Yes, the company was founded by German immigrants. Two brothers who were bankers and cigar aficionados. They were always sending cigars back to their friends in Europe and finally decided to open their own factory, but it has Cuban owners now.” Before they went inside, Emiliano said, “You know, it doesn’t surprise me that your stepfather smokes Montecristos. Handmade Cuban cigars are very popular with the Washington crowd.”
Suddenly, Jackie remembered Jack Kennedy lighting up a cigar after dinner at the Bartletts and telling her that it had been made in Cuba. Oh great, all I need is to find him lurking inside this factory, she thought, the way he showed up at La Europa.
But inside, there was nothing except row upon row upon row of long wooden tables with workers seated on benches, side by side, eyes down, their hands busily flying. Seamlessly, one after another, the workers rolled leaves of tobacco into cylinders and clipped the ends as they listened to a matronly woman lector reading the Gaceta Oficial newspaper into a microphone from her perch on a chair on a high wooden platform. Except for the thick, tangy smell of tobacco that permeated the air, the room was like a huge study hall with exceptionally well-behaved students.
It was so hot and humid in the factory that Jackie had to fan her face with her hand. “They can’t have air-conditioning in here,” Emiliano explained, “because it would dry out the tobacco leaves.”
Jackie followed Emiliano to the front of the room, where he found a chair for her. Then she watched him withdraw what appeared to be a well-worn book from a stack of reading material, climb the steps of the platform, and greet the lector with a friendly smile. She smiled back, obviously happy to see him, exchanged a few words with him, and nodded.
Jackie assumed that Emiliano had selected a book for the lector to read. But to her surprise, the lector rose from her chair and descended the steps, and Emiliano took her place.
I hope he won’t lull the workers to sleep, Jackie thought nervously, but she sat up in her chair when Emiliano raised the book in his hand and announced the title into the microphone in a resonant voice that was like a call to arms: “Los Miserables.”
Great choice, Jackie thought. Victor Hugo’s masterpiece was one of her all-time favorites. She had actually devoured all nineteen hundred pages of it in French, mesmerized by the brilliance of the ideas and the emotional pull of characters like Jean Valjean, sentenced to nineteen years of hard labor in prison for stealing a loaf of bread, and Fantine, a poverty-stricken mother reduced to prostitution to pay for her daughter’s care. Les Misérables was so familiar to her, and French was so similar to Spanish, that Jackie was confident that she would grasp what Emiliano was about to read.
Before he began reading, Emiliano gave a short introductory speech about the book’s themes of struggle and redemption in France culminating in the July Revolution of 1830 and the student-led uprising of 1832. The similarity between France at that time and present-day Cuba was implicit.