barbS

il. by Piven

CASTRO'S BEARD (excerpt)
by Jorge Casuso

"My fellow combatants, illustrious colleagues, gracious ladies," the elderly man said, staring at the crowd gathered in the small air-conditioned banquet hall on a sweltering Sunday afternoon. "I am pleased, more than pleased, I am honored to have the privilege to introduce to you a man who knows firsthand the shackles of slavery, the pangs of a soul hungering for freedom, a man who braved shark-infested waters to feel the gentle breeze of liberty."

Poor old fool, Ignacio thought, as he prepared to stand for the crowd whose graying members were older than the parents he had left back on the island when he accepted this mission two months ago. He waited for his cue from the speaker, a short, wiry man in a blue polyester suit, a Cuban flag pinned to his lapel.

"With extreme gratitude and deep honor, I present to you the new, shining face of our movement, our esteemed new colleague and fellow combatant, Ignacio Robles."

Ignacio rose from his chair, placed his napkin on the table and walked up to the podium as the crowd applauded. In his coat pocket was a speech he had prepared the night before. He could never hope to reproduce the overblown prose on Epsilon 7's antiquated website, so he had gathered key phrases from the speeches, manifestos and declarations the group's leaders had posted and cobbled them together into a speech he was now afraid to deliver. The elderly men in the crowd watching him had probably wrestled over the phrases he was about to read. They would surely recognize their own words.

Ignacio took the podium, pulled out his speech and studied the crowd staring back at him with enthusiastic expectation. He took a sip of water from the glass placed for him at the podium and began to read.

"Comandante Assens, esteemed gentlemen, kind ladies, I thank our courageous leader for those lofty words I can only hope of one day fulfilling. As Epsilon 7's newest member, I bow my head with respect before these tireless fighters in a spontaneous gesture of admiration."

He looked up. So far so good. Ignacio continued.

"When a tyrant seizes power and oppresses a once proud nation, when the very spirit is systematically destroyed, when our very minds are shackled in chains, there is no alternative than to rise up and strike the enemy in the face with a steel fist, because to live on our knees is to be worse than dead."

The crowd burst into applause. Encouraged by the response, Ignacio read the final paragraphs and strangely found himself caught up in the rhetoric, riding the cadence of the phrases, feeding off of the emotions of the crowd, which was now standing and cheering his every word.

"We must be rebels in the face of giants against injustice," he concluded, and, suddenly, having lost his sense of place, finding the words he was reading could just as easily apply to the tyrannical giant that was American imperialism, he added a final emphatic punctuation that was not in his prepared speech.

"Venceremos!" he cried.

The crowd fell silent. For what seemed like minutes, Ignacio stood in the soundless room and stared at the incredulous faces frozen by the battle cry of their mortal enemy.
Finally, Assens began to clap, and the others joined in grudgingly, as Ignacio, who felt the blood drain from his body at the thought that he had blown his cover, walked weakly back to his chair.

Jorge Casuso is a former correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, currently managing editor of  Miami's  weekly alternative magazine Miami New Times.