14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 6 March 2024 — Carlos Lechuga Hevia was a machine for the Revolution. His grandfather, Colonel Manuel Lechuga was a machine for Independence. What type of machine is his grandson, Carlos D. Lechuga? His first last name is barely a letter, an elipsis, interfering with the nice ring of the clan name. Lechuga Hevia, red aristocrat, Castro’s ambassador in New York during the Cuban Missile Crisis, returns as a ghost to settle scores with his grandson for converting him into a fictional character and stealing — for the title of his book — the golden rule of communist hospitality: This is your house, Fidel. You better run, D. Lechuga.
Published by De Conatus, the grandson’s 137 pages are an insult to the memory of the ashen comandante, familiar idol and devil upon the shoulder of pioneer Lechuga. The mantra, from preschool through sixth grade, was one, “Fidel-Alejandro-Castro-Ruz!” The fantasy: that his grandfather would die so that he’d attend the funeral, with a sensational bodyguard, the supreme grandfather, Fifo. His biggest desire: to extend the hand of the Revolution itself, with its long, chilling nails.
Lechuga Hevia, red aristocrat, Castro’s ambassador in New York during the Cuban Missile Crisis, returns as a ghost to settle scores with his grandson for converting him into a fictional character
But Lechuga has no reason to run. He is far from the tropics and his childhood, and ghosts don’t bite. The main character of those 137 pages is him and no one — not even the other children born in the 80s — can steal the show, which begins with the imaginary funeral of the old man and ends with the suitcase he brought to Spain. “Am I leaving anything behind? Anything that defined me? Was I leaving myself behind?” I get the impression that Lechuga still has not answered these questions and that one book is not enough for him to do so. But, let’s get back to the pioneer who dreamed about Fidel.
Lechuga seems — we see him — with the neckerchief and white shirt, distinctive of a good student and a last name that opens doors. García Márquez visited his grandfather’s house frequently; he and the old man had in common that both were surrounded by girls, women and matriarchs. Lechuga was the first boy of the family and he was named after the ambassador. “If the baby is a boy he will be named Carlos, like his grandfather; if it is a girl, she will be named Carla; and if it is born gay, it will be named Carlota.”
Childhood was idyllic. Thinking in Russian, dreaming in American, the hierarchy was clear and it always imitated the State. Lechuga Hevia was the household Fidel; Carlos the child, a little proletariat at the bottom of the cosmic order. When anyone brought his grandfather a sweet, his wife would toss it, in case they were trying to poison him like the comandante. One day the child discovered that Castro not only had a symbolic double–his grandfather and the rest–but also a real one. A slightly heavier farmer but with the same face. One of many, he later learned, who played the Fidel game to such an extent that every year, the Spanish film about Franco’s double, Espérame en el cielo, would air on television.
With adolescence, which coincided with the Special Period, the world begins to crack. Lechuga feels that, like his mother, there is a magnetic field that wants to expel him from the family photograph. “Life has put me in an inferior place,” reasoned the child when workers at the Romanian Embassy, near his house, threw “things” across the fence. But the mental breakthrough arrived when he saw the “enraged people” crushing an independent journalist. The possibility of turning into part of the mob, the dilemma between being complicit or protesting, resulted in an instinctive reaction, “I had to censor myself. Edit. Delete.”
The possibility of turning into part of the mob, the dilemma between being complicit or protesting, resulted in an instinctive reaction, “I had to censor myself. Edit. Delete.”
We will always doubt whether Lechuga is telling the truth when he describes falling in love with a young man whose code name is the Afghan whippet. If he had any “Elvispreslian attitude” or whether anyone had to tell him to deepen his voice and stop being “soft”. But sexual rebellion was only the result of political rebellion, and the sharpest hierarchs came to warn him, “We hope to continue knowing you as the good kid, Lechuga’s grandson, and not as a vile worm.”
It was quite late. When grandfather died, Fidel did not go to the burial. The world of Lechuga Hevia, the loyalty machine, was in ruins. “Traveling down Quinta Avenida, you could see its books in the trash, its old passports, its bar in the shape of a globe, the painting of the singing fish.” The “comrades in arms” looted his mansion before the family could act.
But this is your house, Fidel is not only the dialogue with the dead, but rather a prologue to his exile, his new life. In 2013, Lechuga managed to screen his film and State Security got wind of — and recognized — the typical worm. He had to leave a couple of years ago. The rest is life, neither fiction nor memories. Lechuga in color, not in black and white. Owner of his cigar. Without having to offer his house to undesirable spooks.
Translated by: Silvia Suárez
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